I would guess that most people everywhere know that last week was the first test match in the 2023 installment of The Ashes: the 140-year-old cricket rivalry between England and Australia. I can think of few sporting events as suffused with literary potential as The Ashes. Maybe a championship prize fight. Perhaps a particularly epic World Series. Perhaps a county road bowling contest. 

This year’s series is enlivened by England’s embrace of Bazball, which I’m still working to understand, but it seems to mean cricket played with unapologetically positive intent. Like many European sports (soccer/futbol, road bowling, golf, boxing, or Quidditch), there is a tradition in cricket of playing for draws or, at very least, playing in such a way to keep one’s options open until circumstances (or the profound lack thereof) force one’s hand. 

Bazball seems to dispense with that (inasmuch as Bazball has a coherent and consistent philosophy) and focus on maximizing the opportunities to win or at least playing in such a way to broadly produce some circumstance at every moment of the game. Whether this approach is “properly sporting” or will pay dividends against an Australian side that is committed to playing a more deliberate, pensive, and traditional style of test cricket, remains to be seen, but the first test match was quite exciting, if nothing else. I’m hesitant to say that England has “Bazballed itself out,” but Australia has asked some hard questions and produced a victory. 

Over the years, I’ve posted a few times on cricket. This year, I think there are more reasons than ever to embrace the leisurely, pre-modern, pace of long-form, test cricket. If nothing else, it’s a pleasant break from the world of pitch clocks, continuously running time, “Champions Leagues,” and “World Cups” (putting aside the somewhat farcical “World Test Championship” which is both so confusing to be almost meaningless for a casual fan and so new to be largely irrelevant). Instead, there are bragging rights, historical memory, and a tiny trophy-urn of disputed origin. In an almost profound way, it is what it is. Even with the rise of Bazball, test cricket represents the kind of escape that doesn’t care much about whether you’re entertained, (over) stimulated, distracted, or bored.

Here’s some of my writing on cricket that I pulled together a couple of years ago.