Cricket: More Than a Game

If ever you needed proof that the English cricket team is reinventing the wheel with BazBall, the collective whining after rain intervened on Australia's behalf in the fourth test would be it.

England's players have taken turns complaining about how unfair it was that rain – that oldest and most final arbiter in cricket matches – got to decide the fate of the Ashes by wiping out their chances of levelling the series ahead of the fifth and final test at the Oval.

Fast bowler Stuart Broad said it "would be unjust if the weather had a decisive say" in the series result, while batsman and former captain Joe Root naively questioned the lack of flexibility in the playing rules as if that doesn't open a whole new can of exploitative worms.

Piers Morgan – that bastion of tabloid rationality – applied the heavy roller to the whinge-fest, tweeting if there had ever been a less deserved retention of the Ashes by Australia, also declaring that England were comfortably the better side in the rubber.

Morgan's final proclamation is at the heart of why the Poms are so triggered, as the kids say. The widely held view in England appears to be that BazBall – the fearless new cricket introduced by England's new coach, former New Zealand captain Brendon McCullum – deserved some kind of reward because it was such a fresh new approach to test cricket.

To be sure, fearless cricket isn't necessarily new. We've had positive cricket, front-foot cricket and, ahem, brave cricket before it as past teams tried to find ways to explain their efforts to speed up the tedium of five consecutive days of cricket.

At this juncture, one should probably point out that at no stage did the England team name their uninhibited new approach BazBall (apparently the first rule of BazBall is you don't talk about BazBall). Rather, their media did and cricket public lapped it up.

But the England team did little to discourage the idea that they were reinventing the wheel by giving the impression that results were secondary to how they played.

I probably should also make a confession that I find watching Bazball fascinating because it answers a question that has been brewing for a while: what happens when red ball cricket borrows liberally from its T20 counterpart?

The result has often been spectacular, the most notable being England becoming the first team in history to score over 500 runs on day one of a test match.

But where the hubris began to set in was when the England team seemed to take professional sport's old adage about focusing on themselves a little too far by completely taking their eye off the opposition and the conditions.

There was the ill-advised declaration on 393 on the very first day of the series, a no-no in test cricket; picking a wicketkeeper more for his batting than his keeping (Jonny Bairstow), and expecting the opposition to observe a subjective concept of the spirit of cricket in their application of the laws, now that they were playing a team so enlightened it levitated.

The consequences of those miscalculations were a 2-0 hole they had dug themselves in the series, and yet they spent the immediate aftermath of those defeats – the first in particular – doubling down with their utterances.

Opening batsman Zak Crawley declared that they would win by 150 runs in the second test at Lord's, while medium pacer Ollie Robinson expressed his surprise at the Aussies "not going toe-to-toe" with them in a match they actually won.

The conceit continued through the overindulgence of Crawley, whose slog to a test best 189 was received as ingenious, while South African-born Kevin Pietersen was once called a "Dumb Slog Millionaire" for a similar approach.

Forget picking a middle-aged Jimmy Anderson for what is essentially a young man's pursuit (fast bowling), England captain Ben Stokes wasn't embarrassed to share with the media that his champion quick baulked at putting his shoulder to the wheel in the opening test as Australia's bowlers batted them to victory because there was nothing in the wicket for him.

Anderson would later publicly threaten to quit if all the wickets were the same as at Edgbaston, an outburst rewarded by not only selecting him again, but also by keeping him in cotton wool for his home game at Old Trafford.

Once you start making decisions on sentiment, you're no longer in the business of elite sporting performance. Rather you're all about vibes and moral victories, much like all of England seem to be claiming now that they can't win the Ashes back.

Throughout the series, England have purported to be playing a game so transcendent both Mother Nature and Mother Cricket had no choice but to reward, to be doing so from the highest of moral high grounds and presented themselves as a team for whom fairness is paramount.

Not only were they exposed to be copying old Australian and West Indies sides in their approach, Twitter also had receipts about the times they resorted to unfair means to dismiss opponents and they, too, once clung on to the solace of rained off days to avoid defeat like so many teams have in the past.

All of which goes to show that nothing is really new in cricket, not even BazBall.