Can Bazball teach us something about freedom?

In the wake of England's remarkable victory over India in Hyderabad, Cameron Wiltshire-Plant explores the unlikely links between Bazball and the spiritual life.

Cameron Wiltshire-Plant

Cameron is training to be a vicar in the city of Leicester.

A gaggle of cricket players, dressed in whites, stand on the field. One raises there arm

The England team.

Back in May 2022, the way England played cricket got a new nickname - bazball. Coined by a journalist, it reflected the name and attitude of the pair who lead the team - .Brendon 'Baz' McCullum and captain Ben Stokes. Both had reputations as attacking players. That nickname has proven to be extremely prescient.

The name has accompanied England in the eighteen months since, describing their transformation from a side languishing with a record of one win in seventeen, to perhaps the most feared side in the world because of their aggressive style of play, winning twelve of their first thirteen tests with Stokes in full-time charge. This England team are currently testing their newfound confidence on an away trip to India where no side has won for eleven years, travelling with more optimism than at any point in the last decade, having whitewashed Pakistan last winter 3-0.

Bazball, at its core, is about freedom to fail. Stokes and McCullum realised that fear of failure was suppressing performances, so they took the burden from the players.

What is ‘Bazball’? It’s even made it into the dictionary, with its definition being ‘a style of test cricket in which the batting side attempts to gain the initiative by playing in a highly aggressive manner.’ This doesn’t go far enough.

The approach is not merely about batting but aggression in bowling, fielding, and team selection, encompassing almost a way of life. Recently retired fast bowler Stuart Broad summarising it as choosing ‘running towards the danger.’ Perhaps cricket journalist Ali Martin sums it up best; ‘to soak up pressure when required but also be brave enough to put it back on opponents at the earliest opportunity; to make taking wickets the sole aim in the field; and to strive chiefly for victory across the five days without considering the draw.’

All of this seems a little bit corporate-speak. Bazball has been accused of this fragility often; that it consists merely of good vibes and brash talk, and that the steam will soon run out of this new approach once some better teams are faced. But dig a little deeper and one principle stands out above the rest: freedom. Cricket can be a suffocating sport to play, even on a village green on a Saturday- a team sport, but one in which the bowler and batsman compete alone in a gladiatorial contest repeatedly. Scale this up to test level, with bowlers throwing them down at 90mph, thousands of spectators, the pressure of performing for your country, and the fight to keep your place in the team, and you can soon see how the pressure can become a burden.

Bazball, at its core, is about freedom to fail. Stokes and McCullum realised that fear of failure was suppressing performances, so they took the burden from the players- the talk of aggression, of running to danger, of attacking, is the permission to fail. By being prepared to lose, if the loss is a result of a determination to win, the fear of defeat is removed. Of course, without the intense pressure of defeat looming over them, players revel in this freedom and performances and results have dramatically improved. Almost all the batsmen have improved their average runs per innings and the bowlers have taken every wicket available except in one instance. Stokes has explained the freedom given in this way to the media:

‘[Bazball] has taken away all the external pressures of playing international sport. There's enough on individuals and as a team as it is but taking all the other stuff away is why everything is so relaxed, calm and enjoyable at the moment.’

Despite Bazball’s wider impact, with England football, rugby, and hockey all admitting to being inspired, does Bazball have anything to say to us outside of elite sport? It could be perceived as simply a method of getting performances out of cossetted professionals weighed down by expectation through a bit of team building and positive messaging. Instead of practicing cricket Stokes’ team practice golf. Players can now set their own bedtimes. How does this relate? However, it’s the stories of McCullum and Stokes that give bedrock to the ethereality of the Bazball concept.

Perhaps this is all Bazball is: cricket-with-context. It’s easy to give freedom from fear of failure when you’ve come close to losing everything.

In November 2014, promising Australian cricketer Phillip Hughes was killed by a bouncer in an Australian domestic game, shocking the cricketing world. Brendon McCullum at the time captained New Zealand’s test team, and Hughes’ death awoke something in him; a realisation that cricket didn’t matter all that much, and was best enjoyed as entertainment, both for the players and spectators. Already an aggressive player and captain, McCullum went into overdrive, playing aggressive but joyful cricket all over the world, freed from consequences and simply enjoying playing. His New Zealand team reached the World Cup final the following year and McCullum signed off with the fastest Test hundred of all time- 54 balls(!)- in his final test.

Stokes himself has walked in his own darkness; arrested in 2017 just as his performances were rocketing for England for violently defending a gay couple on a night out after a win in Bristol, he lost the vice-captaincy and a place on an away Ashes tour despite eventually being acquitted. In 2021, after sustaining an injury to his finger that would not heal, and amidst the death of his father, he wrestled with panic attacks and anxiety, ultimately taking a six-month break from the sport completely. It’s easy to see because of these stories why losing a game of cricket has come to matter less than enjoyment of the sport and playing in an entertaining and relaxed style. Perhaps this is all Bazball is: cricket-with-context. It’s easy to give freedom from fear of failure when you’ve come close to losing everything.

This is something Christians have known for centuries. The knowledge that your darkest sins and most crass mistakes aren’t fatal, but can be forgiven and wiped clean can give a freedom that transforms life. Rather than the anxious striving for perfection that can come in both religious and in secular forms, there is freedom to fail. After all, performance anxiety is a problem for social media influencers, hedge fund traders and teachers as well as cricketers.

Of course forgiveness can be abused as a kind of license to do what you want, knowing you'll get pardoned in the end anyway. But that only reveals a heart that acts out of self-interest, not love. Just as Bazball arises out of a sheer love for the game, as even more important than winning, so Christian behaviour arises, not from a desire to get away with as much as you can can, but out of love for God and your neighbour. And paradoxically - both approaches end up 'winning' more often than not - either successful cricket, or a healthy spiritual and moral life.

This is the graced existence: knowing that we are all free to fail because of the love of God who forgives. In an infinitely truer way than that Bazball is context-making for cricket, so this grace is context-making for life; held by this God in friendship, despite our petty sins and moral confusion. Just as Bazball allows cricketers to play with freedom, ignoring the pressure of expectation and simply enjoying the game, so humans can live with freedom, winning the battle against the limitations and pressure we put on ourselves, and simply enjoy being alive.

After all, if we offend, make awkward, or receive rejection, grace holds us. And if these things go well, our lives will be much richer.

The freedom to fail has released these cricketers to play the most exciting, aggressive, entertaining cricket they can. They have used their self-made context for good. How can we use our God-given context for good? In the same way: remembering that we are held by grace and able to live without fear, able to conquer our own pressures and expectations, the narratives of self-criticism that restrain us in our same old ways. If our actions had no consequences, what risks might we take? Perhaps we would tend towards the destructive like the scenes played out in The Purge. Or perhaps, held by grace, we could tend towards the constructive. Breaking the habits we know have held us back. Conversing with people outside of our comfort zone, seeking out their stories. Phoning the friend or family member with whom our relationship has broken down. After all, if we offend, make awkward, or receive rejection, grace holds us. And if these things go well, our lives will be much richer.

Sometimes Bazball is revered as a novel method to relieve pressure and extract performances from tense athletes, but the Christian faith demonstrates this is nothing new. Bazball might have revolutionised Test cricket, but Stokes and McCullum have simply rediscovered the freedom that comes from God’s gift of grace.

Article

Comment

Football

Justice

29 July 2025

5 min read

The 50-year injustice at the heart of women’s football

Now we need to do these two things to put right decades of disparity

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

A victorious women's football team celeberate.

It came home.

The Football Association.

I don’t normally like men’s international football. I spend all season wishing Bukayo Saka and Jordan Pickford nothing but misfortune and now, suddenly, I’m expected to cheer them on? Not for me, thanks. I’ll stick to revelling in scouse Schadenfreude when football, inevitably, does not come home.

By contrast, I find the Lionesses much easier to support. That’s probably because, to my shame, I don’t really follow the Women’s Super League as much as I should. I don’t watch them with any petty grudges lingering in my mind. It does mean, however, that I can happily join the 12.2 million other people tuning in to watch Chloe Kelly hop, skip, and volley England to another European Championship.

It also helps that they seem to keep winning in the most implausible ways possible. There’s a stat going round social media at the moment that, across all the knock-out games of this Euros, England were only ahead for 4 minutes and 52 seconds. Incredible.

The Lionesses have – yet again – managed to show their nation the joy and drama of football and look set to inspire yet more women and girls to get involved in grass roots football. Women’s football, it would seem, is in rude health. But, look beneath the surface a little, and there are still significant disparities between the women’s game and the men’s game.

In May, Chelsea effectively sold their women’s team to themselves: they sold the team to BlueCo (Chelsea’s parent company) for a reported £198.7m. This is not the first time Chelsea have engaged creative accounting. In April. 2024, the club revealed it had sold two hotels it owned to one of BlueCo’s sister companies (a move later upheld by the Premier League itself). A whole women’s football team – a good one, at that! – being leveraged for accounting purposes.

Elsewhere, Liverpool Women’s Team sold their star player – Canadian forward Olivia Smith – to Arsenal for a world record fee of … £1m. To put that into context, Liverpool’s men’s team have already bought Florian Wirtz for roughly £116m this summer. They may add to that by buying Alexander Isak for anywhere up to £150m. And that’s to ignore the purchases Hugo Ekitike (£69m), Milos Kerkez (£40.8m), or Jeremie Frimpong (£35m). Moreover, the first male player to be sold by an English club was Trevor Francis, sold by Birmingham City to Nottingham Forrest. The year? 1979. 46 years ago.

In purely financial terms, then, the women’s game seems to be about 50 years behind the men’s. And yet, there are the Lionesses. They have just retained the European Championship. They have made three finals in a row, winning the Euros twice and narrowly losing the World Cup final in 2023. By contrast, the men’s team famously haven’t won a major trophy since 1966.

And so why does women’s football exist in an alternative financial universe about 50 years behind the men’s game? Well, I think a big part of it is making up for lost time.

The FA banned women from playing at FA-affiliated grounds between 1921 and 1971. Did you know that? It’s one of the UK’s greatest sporting shames and yet it’s hardly common knowledge. How like this country to front up to its institutional mistakes with silence.

For 50 years women were effectively unable to participate in the sport in any meaningful and professional way. 50 years. Where have we heard that number before?

Prior to this, women’s football had been rather popular. Dick, Kerr Ladies FC regularly attracted matchday audiences of thousands. In 1920, the year before the FA ban, 53,000 fans went to Goodison Park to watch they play against St. Helens. For context, this is a crowd so big the vast majority of Premier League stadiums would not be able to accommodate it. It would fill Brentford’s stadium three times over, and there would still be people queuing up outside.

For 50 years, men’s football was able to accelerate and grow while women’s football matches simply weren’t possible. Who knows where women’s football would be now, if it had been allowed to continue with the successes it had won for itself.

The success of the men’s game is built, in part, upon the enforced stagnation of the women’s game. People watched men’s football because it was the only football it was possible to watch. Men’s football owes its success in part to this. I don’t see how we can say otherwise. In response to this, I wonder if there are two things the sport might do to attempt to rectify this somewhat: one big, one small.

First, the big change. I wonder if there does need to be some form of reparations instituted to restore parity and to right the wrongs of the past? I know this won’t be popular. I love football, and I love it when my football club spends loads of money on players. I love that Liverpool (men’s team) might spend over £100m on two separate players this summer. I probably shouldn't be rubbing my hands at this, but if I’m honest, I am.

But at least some of this money ought to be diverted away from the men’s game and funnelled towards the women’s game. If men’s football is built in no small part on the enforced cessation of women’s football, then this seems only to be right. It’s not about punishing men’s football or paying a penalty for wrongdoing. It’s simply about restoring back to women’s football that which rightfully belongs to it.

Second, the small change. We should start calling men’s football teams ‘Men’s Football Teams’. When I talk about Liverpool Men’s Team, I just say ‘Liverpool’. I know, and anyone listening to me knows, that I mean the men’s team. I then add ‘Women’s’ when I’m talking about the Women’s Team.

The effect of this is that the ‘Men’s Team’ becomes the ‘default’ way of thinking about football. It is the ‘normal’ way of engaging with the sport, and this is then qualified or relativised by my talking about ‘Women’s football’ elsewhere. ‘Women’s Football’ becomes a smaller sub-category of the bigger category of ‘football’ as a whole, which is implicitly linked to ‘Men’s football’ specifically.

By taking the time to specify ‘Men’s Football’, we remind one another that football needn’t be played by men at all. That it, too, is just one way in which the sport might be engaged with or played. Not the ‘default’ or ‘correct’ way the sport exists. It’s a small change that, with time, may have a big effect on the way the sport as a whole of perceived.

50 years of injustice cannot be repaired overnight. There is a lot of work to be done to undo the wrongs of football’s historic treatment of women. But the sooner men’s football starts, the sooner justice will be restored.

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