Bazball Uber Alles
The first session of the second Test was the moment we knew there was no turning back
When you have accepted excess into your heart in the way that the religious take God into their soul, it raises a question: how much is too much? How big is too big? How far is too far?
Many years ago I was on the set of a music video at Pinewood studios. The music was Jim Steinman’s, one of his non-Meat Loaf, post Bat Out Of Hell projects. The director, personally chosen by Jim, was Ken Russell, another man not exactly known for restraint when it came to his artistic output.
It was all completely mad: they had lots of almost naked beautiful people wondering around, small fires burned, there was a strange light box for the singer to lie on. They had tables heaving with food and scores of assistants on unknown errands. It was costing thousands of pounds per minute, and they’d spent all the budget in the first few hours while Jim and Ken stood around whispering to each other.
“Don’t worry,” Jim said to Ken, “just carry on. I’ll pay.”
Jim’s idea for the climax of the video was for someone to ride a motorcycle up the stairs of a nearby church bell tower and then explode through the window at the top. That didn’t happen, but for Jim, big was never quite big enough. A few days later we went for lunch and he ordered everything on the menu.
England reached their Jim Steinman moment in Wellington. Stuck in on a wicket skilfully exploited by New Zealand’s bowlers, they chose life. They chose excess. They chose everything on the menu.
As Jim himself once wrote: there will be hell to pay some day, put it all on the bill.
That bill almost came in. It was maybe the most extraodinary session of Test cricket in the modern era, not so much in terms of the brilliance of the play, because for a lot of the time it was far from brilliant, but in the psychological territory that it occupied. Because this was Bazball Uber Alles. England were all in and then some. It was the total commitment for which McCullum and Stokes have asked. And once it began, it was, as another great writer called William Shakespeare said, ‘I am in blood/stepped in so far that should I wade no more/Returning were as tedious as going over.’
Never, ever look back. Or down.
And somehow, this time, it worked. Not for the soldiers who fell, soldiers like Zak Crawley, so out of form that he drove at every ball of Southee’s first over and then popped the last one, impossibly beautifully, over the bowler for six. Crawley averages nine in New Zealand. He hasn’t actually scored a run off Matt Henry. It didn’t matter. He got the one that had his name on it anyway, but at least he had that six. Ben Duckett got a good one, too. Joe Root, Bazball grandad, was caught up in the madness and played the worst shot of the day, groaning over the stump mic as he did. Jacob Bethell, as my dad often said to the young me, “got four happy” and swung once too often at a cleverly bowled short ball.
Pope somehow managed to look like the best and the worst player in the team in consecutive deliveries. Even the sainted Brook, touched by the gods, those waxy wings not yet scorched by the sun, played two or three appalling mows with (apparently) no rhyme or reason. Any of them could have got him out, and got him headlines of a different kind.
Except that, as mentioned above, it worked. They got runs on the board at five per over and had a go at New Zealand while the pitch was still fresh. And that worked too.
Stokes has shown that he is prepared to accept ugly defeat. He is not prepared to accept conventional thinking and he will not stand for surrender. He has all the power and charisma of a cult leader, and he has completely re-thought English Test match cricket. His men have no choice but to join him, and they have done so with the fervour of converts.
Last night’s first session, was ugly, mad, excessive. England lobbed a grenade into the game and watched as it went off. This time, when the smoke cleared, they were somehow ahead.