My 'Bazbullshitted' nightmare

One of the 'Wisden 41' speaks out

I always wondered what it would be like to wake up in the eye of a media storm, the chilling moment when you catch sight of a headline and think, bloody hell, that’s… ME…

Well imagine no more.

‘NO AUSTRALIANS IN ‘BAZBULLSHITTED’ WISDEN XI CREATES STORM DOWN UNDER’ Thundered The Thunderer itself, The Times, via the great Patrick Kidd’s Saturday column, The Tailender.

‘…Australian cricket fans were up in arms at Wisden Cricket Monthly’s selection of its Test team of 2024 this week. Despite having won six matches out of nine, a better proportion than anyone, there are no Aussies in the Wisden XI,’ the Tailender said.

And there was more. Lots more.

‘A panel of 41 journalists from around the world, four from Australia, selected five England players. You can imagine how well that went down. “Bazbullshitted,” tweeted Jim Maxwell, the commentator. Peter McGuinness, an old friend from Queensland, emailed: “Shouldn’t let actual accomplishments interfere with good old-fashioned confirmation bias and juvenile enmity.”

Fully conscious now, I realised with a dreadful certainty that this was about me. I was one of the Wisden 41.

I was a Bazbullshitter, filled with juvenile emnity.

Well alright, it’s a fair cop. In December each year, Wisden Cricket Monthly asks its contributors to select some teams of the year, including a Men’s Test XI. The criteria are loose. There’s a link to the year’s stats, a friendly reminder that something your favourite player did in 2021 no longer counts so stop voting for it you dumbass, and that’s about it. You can cast your ballot for who you like.

This imaginary team is not taking part in any kind of fantasy fixture. There is no opposition, no venue, no more granular detail to take into account. So I chose away. I expect it took in excess of five minutes.

And then Hell broke loose.

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I had my first contribution to any kind of magazine published back in 1987, so I know the score (and those still running a magazine in 2025 have my undying admiration - try finding anyone under about 30 who buys one regularly…)

December, when, on a monthly at least, you often have to produce the bulk of two issues if you want any kind of time off, is a wasteland. There’s no new product, everyone else is shutting up shop for Christmas - no interviews, nothing happening, empty pages stretching out endlessly ahead. It’s why you see so many end of year charts, ‘best of [insert date here]’, listicles, extracts, new year’s resolutions of the stars, basically anything you can get hold of that fills some space until something starts happening again.

End of year lists serve another function, too. They’re something to disagree with. If you get it badly wrong, you might lose a little bit of the trust of your readers, but get it right and bingo – you might just land the big one, like a headline in the Times and a chunk of free publicity.

Everyone wins really. Even Jim Maxwell secretly likes being outraged, and he can mention it endlessly on commentary when England are no doubt getting hammered in the Ashes next winter.

In the matter of my defence, here’s the team I sent in:

Yashasvi Jaiswal, Ben Duckett, Kane Williamson, Joe Root, Harry Brook, Kamindu Mendis, Rishabh Pant (wk), R Ashwin, Pat Cummins (c), Kagiso Rabada, Jasprit Bumrah

So, you see, Jim Maxwell, mine did have an Australian, and as captain, too. Cummins, for me, is undroppable as both bowler and skipper, but you know, there are 40 other voices out there, and they disagreed. The other 40 are wrong, but what can you do? Last year I didn’t select Joe Root in my team, and they disagreed with that, too.

At the moment, I am re-reading Daniel Kahneman’s majesterial Thinking Fast And Slow. Forget about Gladwell and Syed and all those other try-hard 10,000 hour merchants, Kahneman, who died last year at the age of 90, was the real deal. He had a mind like a razor and the little matter of a Nobel prize in his back pocket. When I read his book the first time, it made sense of every terrible decision I’d ever made.

The Aussies may be moaning about confirmation bias, but the one that really stays with me is the availability heuristic. Decisions made with the ‘fast’ part of the brain are deeply prone to this. The mind naturally recalls the most easily available piece of information first, so if, for example, you’re choosing a cricket team, the list of names paints a picture in your head. Some players hit the pleasure receptors harder than others and you lean towards them, especially in the absence of other criteria with which to decide.

There are the stats, of course, and much of cricket, especially T20 cricket, focuses on the ability of the numbers to salami-slice the 120 deliveries in a single innings. As far the Wisden XI went, the absence of Travis Head – and according to the Times, this was the Aussies’ major gripe – is easily explained statistically. He averaged 40 to the other middle order batters’ 50-plus. Case closed.

And yet, wouldn’t you want Travis Head in your team? The guy is a destroyer of universes. He plays big innings that win massive games of cricket – notably World Cup Finals and World Test Championships (although both incidentally pre-2024, so you know…)

It’s an example of the war that rages in all of selection, especially now. Bazbullshit in particular floats on vibes. It’s about a feeling, an ability to ‘see’ something in a player that the stats don’t. It’s the opposite of Moneyball, which set the tone for the past decade or so with its ideas about deep statistical analysis trumping aesthetics.

So what are ‘vibes’? That is a question worth asking. One of the flawed processes that Kahneman describes is the Overconfidence Effect, placing undue weight on what the mind ‘thinks’ it knows. Then there is Prospect Theory, which deals with loss aversion. What value is placed on a change in probability? Kahneman found that an increase of a good outcome from zero to 10 per cent or from 90 to 100 per cent was more highly valued than one from 45 to 55 per cent, even though all are gains of the same amount.

Vibes approaches each of those states differently to stats. It places value on other measures. Weirdly it has more place in Test cricket than shorter forms, where you might think (availability heuristic) that the game is more free form and open to experimentation.

When you’re choosing a team, you’re framing a question: which players would form the best combination for these particular circumstances? In Thinking Fast And Slow, how a question is framed usually determines its answer. To get the right answer, you need to ask the right question.

Bazball’s framing question is not simply about results, but the pleasure of watching. Will this team win, yes, but will it be remembered? The right combination of players for that second clause is not always the same as the first.

Is it Bazbullshit? You’d probably need Daniel Kahneman to work that one out. As for Wisden, and the wisdom of the crowds (excluding Australia), here’s their team of the year:

Yashasvi Jaiswal, Ben Duckett, Kane Williamson, Joe Root, Harry Brook, Kamindu Mendis, Jamie Smith (wk), Ravindra Jadeja, Gus Atkinson, Matt Henry, Jasprit Bumrah (c).