The Real Test
Shouldn't there be a BazBall documentary? I'm not so sure...
“You write the rules ya fuckin’ idiots” - Marcus Harris
Never let it be said that we don’t have a handle on the zeitgeist in these parts. As the eyes of the cricketing world are transfixed by the low scoring shootouts of the T20 World Cup in America and the Caribbean and with England’s own white ball wheels coming loose once more…I found myself spending most of the past week hoovering up The Test - the Amazon documentary series that goes under the lid of the Australian cricket team. The first series came out over four years ago. Like I said, pulse, meet finger.
The series (the third of which has recently ‘dropped’ - in modern media parlance) offers a peep into the life of a professional cricketer, a whiff of the smelly socks and angrily strewn jocks, a cocked ear on the dressing room camaraderie and otherwise of an ‘elite’ cricket team.
That synonym - ‘elite’ - of course comes courtesy of Justin Langer who uses the word liberally in the first series - ‘elite mateship this’, ‘elite honesty that’. Me neither. Langer is one of the most intriguing aspects of that first series (season - in modern media parlance) especially his management of and relationship with the players.
‘JL’, as he’s known throughout, veers from embarrassing dad - delivering wide eyed enthusiasm for the Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper remake of ‘A Star Is Born’ and kicking over a changing room bin whilst Ben Stokes’ is running rampant at Headingley - only to then meticulously put all the litter back - through to gap year guru - encouraging the players to trudge around the Edgbaston outfield in bare feet ahead of the first Test of the 2019 Ashes, a practice known as ‘earthing’.
(The alfrestoes certainly didn’t hurt by the way - Australia won that first Test by 251 runs, why do you think I’m writing this piece sans socks?)
In between times, Langer displays a more hard bitten approach - one memorable scene shows him making his players sit through Stokes’ Headingley innings the very next day. Cue heavy lidded, heavily hooded, emotionally and physically spent players gathered round a television at a soulless hotel conference room in Leeds. ‘I’m feeling pretty bloody confronted JL’. But again, maybe it worked? Australia won the next Test at Old Trafford by 185 runs, securing the Ashes in the process.
In that first series, context is crucial. The series was commissioned and filmed in the aftermath of the sandpaper scandal at Newlands in 2018 and follows the Australian Test side as they try to rebuild their tarnished ‘culture’ and standing with the Australian and wider cricketing public. The whole thing surely started as an operation in re-branding as much as anything. The appeal of opening up and letting the outside in not lost on the documentary makers or the players themselves.
Usman Khawaja, one of the players who features most across the three series - and very well he comes across too - admitted as much when talking to Gideon Haigh and Peter Lalor on their Cricket Et Al podcast recently. Khawaja explains that the decision to green light the series wasn’t a unanimous one amongst the squad, not initially at least.
“I was one of the fore-runners in advocating for the documentary.” The Aussie opener tells Pete and Gid. “I remember we had a meeting before it happened - and the management at the time were trying to get a read on what the players were thinking. A lot of the guys were very apprehensive. I was probably one of the first to put my hand up, because I love American sports documentaries.”
Khawaja reveals that a lot of the older players were against the idea, that they had the mentality of the changing room as sacrosanct.
“I was quite open, I said ‘they’re my favourite documentaries - you get to see inside, you get to see the personalities, you get to see what happens. We have an opportunity here to get a whole new fanbase, of people who’ve never even seen cricket before, we can get them interested, they’ll get to see what we are like as people… to see the inner sanctum.”
Sure enough, the post scandal period made that first series appointment viewing (in modern media parlance) and also offered the opportunity for redemption and re-calibration. In that regard it more than delivers. After girding my loins to encounter some *despicable* Aussies like the ones that terrorised my sub conscious as a youth it was with some disappointment, at first, that the opposite revealed itself to be true.
A more likeable, knockabout, quirky (especially in the bromance between Marcus Stoinis and Adam Zampa and the childlike zeal of Marnus Labuschagne) and relatable bunch of blokes you’d be hard pressed to find, especially in an ‘elite sport’ format. There’s the odd notable exception, namely Tim Paine, though maybe that’s hindsight creeping in a little too. Or maybe not.
As I say, likeable. A few episodes in, I even found myself rooting for Matthew Wade. Imagine that. A feeling felt and a sentence written that still seems unfathomable to me, but there I was in front of my TV, willing him on.
It’s stayed with me too. Wade was giving it both barrels of chirrup out in the middle against England in Barbados at the weekend, alpha-strutting about between overs, generally presenting as your worst stag-doo weekend squashed into a 5ft 7in human form, showcasing ‘elite knobbishness’ basically, the type of behaviour that would have previously made me think dark thoughts towards him.
But, after watching him and his wife, Julia, in The Test, I saw his antics in a new light. Wade is the dog deprived of the bone who finally gets the bone and isn’t going to let the bone go no matter what. Julia Wade encouraged her husband to have a final crack at Test cricket so that he wouldn’t have to live with any lingering regrets regarding his career, this ultimately sees him selected for the 2019 tour of England, catching a flight over to join the squad just four days after their second child was born.
“Seeing him go was a tough one” Julia says through tears. “But I knew he had to go and I wanted him to go.”
It’s a moving scene, neatly encapsulating the sacrifices that the game demands of those at the top, not just of the players but their families too.
I found myself nodding along, wobbly lipped. Internally beseeching.
‘Go. Go and do your worst Wadey. And don’t come back til you’ve pissed off all of England!’
Wade would score an integral, characteristically pugilistic century in the second innings of the first Test at Edgbaston and a less well remembered but no less impressive hundred in the final Test of the series at the Oval.
The documentary is full of this drama, the access the cameras have behind the scenes heightening the action on the field. At times it feels almost voyeuristic. A case in point comes during the latest series when it is particularly galling to see Nathan Lyon sobbing heavy tears into a towel after, in his words, ‘blowing my calf to pieces’ during his 100th consecutive Test at Lord’s.
The cameras follow Lyon off the field and into the changing room, those giant bush-baby eyes fixed with pain and and a peculiar kind of grief. They stay on him as he lies forlorn in the changing room with a compression bandage around his injured leg and capture his teammates’ quiet sorrow and compassion as they return to the field and find out the news that his series is over. Well, not quite. He did go out and bat, on one leg. Something that I had actually completely forgotten despite being at Lord’s to witness it live. I guess that says something about last year’s Ashes.
Mitchell Starc was the batter in the middle who sees a crook Lyon hobbling out to join him, using his bat as a walking stick.
“What is going on here?” Starc says incredulously. “This peanut’s walking out to bat.”
See - the series is funny too. Whether intentionally or not. The use and delivery of the word ‘peanut’ by Starc really made me laugh. As did the series stealing cameo by Marcus Harris after the Lord’s run out debacle. Harris, who is barely in the series at all that I can recall, pops up to to deliver the line at the top of this piece. Dripping in just the right amount of Aussie disdain for the spam-faced MCC members who have just abused his teammates as they walked back through the long room after The Bairstow Incident, as Martin Amis might’ve called it. Protagonist: Jonathan Marc Creasewalk. A gleeful Lyon also perks up to deliver the delightfully schoolyard “Suck eggs!” as the Lord’s crowd can be heard booing in the background.
Like in any successful series, the minor characters start to become cult figures of their own. My favourite being a mute Graeme Hick in the first series. I think Hick is there as a batting coach but suspect he’s not even sure really, he has the air of a man who has been handed a dog stick by a runner seconds before and pushed onto the screen. Episode after episode he can be seen but not heard, once you notice him, you can’t un-notice him. There’s something mesmeric about it. Hick is an Easter Island statue in cap and shades. Lips clamped. Qantas and Asics slathered across his stony torso.
Across the entire three seasons there are further fascinating, poignant and visceral moments. Nevertheless, upon finishing the final episode I did wonder if perhaps the format might’ve become a little stale. That line from Jimmy Breslin came to mind - “I always went to the loser’s dressing room… that’s where the story was”.
The Australian side of the present are in a far better and thus potentially less interesting place than they were when the series first began. Gunning as they are right now for their third ICC gong to go with the 50 over World Cup and World Test Championship already in their cabinet. I’m sure the cameras are following them now, as they surely will when England head Down Under for the 2025 Ashes. Is watching a successful machine as interesting as a faltering one? Maybe not. Will most of us watch anyway? Probably.
A final thought. Since the series aired I’ve seen and received a few messages all asking the same thing. Why don’t England have a BazBall documentary? That’d be fascinating, surely? To which my answer is: I’m not so sure. What’s that old quote about seeing how sausages are made? For Stokes and McCullum maybe there is more merit in not revealing the trick, lest it be a disappointment. Keep ‘em guessing etc etc.
I think the mystique is a big part of the BazBall experiment. We don’t really know how Stokes and McCullum operate behind closed doors. How much of the current Test side’s ethos is solely built on beanbag-straddling-blue-sky-thinking-whilst-sporting-90s-shades? How much of their manifesto is Marx and Engels - ‘Zak Crawley, you have nothing to lose but your chains!’ and how much is simply ‘Big Beats Are The Best, Get High All The Time’ a la Peep Show’s Super Hans and Jez. How much of it is truly inspired by a type of avant-garde leadership and how much, let’s be honest, by bullshit?
We might have an inkling, perhaps, but part of the fun is imagining what might go on behind closed doors. I wonder if once you see it all laid out then the illusory, intriguing, even inspiring part of whatever the BazBall alchemy is actually dissipates?
Do we really want to know how much golf they actually play? How many puzzle books Jonny Bairstow has actually completed? How Ben Duckett really feels when he pops a bucket hat on his head? I’ve written before about how some of the BazBall rhetoric started to stick in the craw during the India series earlier in the year. If we are allowed unrestricted access to England’s dressing room then maybe, just maybe, we won’t actually like what we see and hear… what if the England players aren’t as clubbable, interesting and likeable as the Aussies?
Now, that would be a real test.
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