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 a curate in Leicestershire

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.

Interview

Books

Creed

S&U interviews

9 February 2024

9 min read

The Devil's perspective

Seeing through a rebel angel’s eyes opens up some surprising new angles on faith. Jonathan Evens interviews author Nicholas Papadopulos.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A statue of an angel crouching and gesturing with one hand.

With The Infernal Word: Notes from a Rebel Angel, Nicholas Papadopulos, Dean of Salisbury Cathedral, is challenging the accepted narrative of faith “through the eyes of a rebel, an angelic non-believer with plenty of attitude.” His book enables readers to see the Biblical story in an unusual light - from the perspective of a devil who took up arms against heaven under the leadership of Satan.

Papadopulos, who worked for seven years as barrister specialising in criminal law prior to ordination, says: “I have always been more interested in questions than answers, both as a criminal lawyer and as a priest. Posing difficult questions identifies the real issues. Writing in the rebel angel’s voice has allowed me to have fun whilst at the same time compelling me to work out what faith in God really means to me. They say the devil has all the best tunes – well, what better way to challenge the accepted narrative of faith than through the eyes of a rebel, an angelic non-believer with plenty of attitude.”

“To admire Satan … is to give one’s vote not only for a world of misery, but also for a world of lies and propaganda, of wishful thinking, of incessant autobiography”

C.S. Lewis.

His central character is a rebel angel who sided with Satan in his insurgency and was cast out of Heaven. He is, as a result, an unhappy devil, perplexed by the triumph of good over evil and the stories of salvation. With eternity to ponder why God emerged triumphant from the struggle, this rebel angel has turned to the Bible, the record of God’s dealings with ‘the humans’ to find out why his side was defeated. Through his conversational and sardonic style, this rebel angel discusses a dozen of God’s significant encounters with humanity - each of which takes place on a mountain top, from Mount Ararat where Noah’s ark pitched up, to the Mount of Ascension where Jesus returns to heaven. Each of these infernal reflections reveals an aspect of God’s inexplicable and unfathomable love for humans and engages deeply with the reality of a loving God who is made visible and vulnerable in Christ.

The Devil and his rebel angels have a significant cultural history. From his earliest known appearance in the Book of Job - probably the oldest book in the Bible - the figure of the devil has haunted Western culture being understood “as the embodiment of evil, a figure of temptation, and a potential foil to God”. In The Devil: A Very Short Introduction, Darren Oldridge describes Christian art as representing the Devil “using naked, dark forms with bestial features, committing revolting acts in a Hellish landscape”. He continues, in relation to literature: “In Goethe's Faust, Mephistopheles' character is conveyed in words of nullity and darkness. Milton's Paradise Lost describes a fiend whose defiance towards God makes him a kind of perverse hero. The Devil is often described as an appealing character who tricks people into committing sins.” However, there is an opposite view, as set out by Erik Butler in The Devil and His Advocates, in which Satan has, since his first appearance, “pursued a single objective: to test human beings, whose moral worth and piety leave plenty of room for doubt.” Butler suggests that, while Satan can be manipulative, “at worst he facilitates what mortals are inclined to do, anyway”.

Responses to John Milton’s Paradise Lost exemplify the debates that rage around the depiction of the Devil in literature. Two rival “interpretive traditions” exist in relation to Milton’s depiction of Satan.

The romantic tradition, understood to have been begun by William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley, “contends that Milton unconsciously favoured Satan and that Satan was the true hero of Paradise Lost”. Blake famously wrote that Milton “was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it”. He views desire and energy as characteristics of the Devil and sees these as being opposed to reason, which is equated with God and the power appropriated by institutional Christianity. Similarly, Shelley in his Defence of Poetry writes: “Milton’s Devil as a moral being is as far superior to his God as one who perseveres in some purpose which he has conceived to be excellent in spite of adversity and torture is to one who in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his enemy.”

Unlike Shelley, however, Blake also believed that Jesus, through artistic imagination, harmonises the binary opposites that Blake viewed as being characterised by the Devil and God and, as a result, advocates a revolutionary form of Christianity. Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials is a more recent imaginative engagement with this side of the Paradise Lost debate, which sits somewhat uneasily between Shelley and Blake.

Set against the romantic view of Milton’s Satan as the true hero of Paradise Lost is a view, exemplified by C.S. Lewis in A Preface to Paradise Lost, which sees Milton’s account of the Fall as being similar to that of Augustine’s City of God, with Satan portrayed, not only as “morally evil but also supremely egotistical … even showing himself in some ways to be foolish and tedious”. Lewis wrote that “To admire Satan … is to give one’s vote not only for a world of misery, but also for a world of lies and propaganda, of wishful thinking, of incessant autobiography”. While Lewis was writing A Preface to Paradise Lost, he was also working on The Screwtape Letters in which, by means of a fictional intercepted correspondence of diabolical counsel from a senior devil to an apprentice devil, seeks to show what the temptation of our souls looks like through the eyes of demons. Bruce L. Edwards suggests that “Screwtape’s timeless brilliance lies in depicting the everyday and showing how from a demonic point of view, the devotion and care Christians show to their fellow men and women, mirrors of the love God has shown to them, is unfathomable to the desperately lost and unreflectively wicked”.

“Why does God bother about such a crowd of undesirables? The angel’s writing is the lens through which I uncover the absurdity of God’s relationship with them.”

With these ongoing debates in mind, I asked Papadopulos where he thought The Infernal Word sits in relation to this diabolical heritage and how the book interacts with it. He responded by saying that: “This rebel angel is concerned with the Biblical narrative and what it discloses of God and of God’s relationship with humanity. He is not principally a tempter (as was Screwtape); nor is he a tragic hero plotting his revenge (as was Milton’s Satan); he is instead something of an investigative journalist – an armchair general, commentator, and amateur theologian, keen to ascertain why on earth God seems so keen on the creation that so regularly lets him down. He is also a realist: he harbours no illusions about the place of his kind in God’s economy. The cross was Christ’s decisive victory – the rebels have been beaten.”

This represents a key difference between Papadopulos’ protagonist and Lewis’ Screwtape. As Edwards notes: “Screwtape never understands why the Enemy [God] loves the patient [human beings], even to the point of giving up His life for another. This is not even ponderable for Hell-bent or Hell-bound dwellers, who are the ultimate egotists and self-aggrandizers.” This difference of approach also raises a question as to why Papadopulos’ protagonist is undertaking his investigation. As he recognises Christ’s decisive victory on the cross, what purpose is served by his investigation? That question takes us to the heart of the book’s purpose which is also linked to the challenges it provides to some accepted narratives of the faith.

We do know, however, why Papadopulos began the book. His ministry, prior to Salisbury, included time as Vicar of St Peter’s Eaton Square, London, and at Canterbury Cathedral as Canon Treasurer and Director of Initial Ministerial Education for the Diocese. The Infernal Word began as addresses preached on Good Friday in those earlier settings. Good Friday, of course, is the moment in the Christian story when the Devil appears to have won. So, I asked Papadopulos what was it about Good Friday that inspired him initially and which called his rebel angel into being: “The devil did not win on Good Friday, and he knows he did not win! Christ’s faithfulness sees to that. But - stuck for a sermon when serving as a parish priest I tried preaching from the vantage point of faith’s opponent - as a devil. Arriving in Canterbury, and needing a theme/motif for a Good Friday Three Hours Devotion, I remembered the experiment, and wrote the series from that vantage point. It obviously needed to culminate with the crucifixion, and that event’s location on a hilltop prompted the addresses which preceded it.”

Writing in the rebel angel’s voice allowed him to have fun while, at the same time, compelled him to work out what faith in God really means to him. He says he has always been more interested in questions than answers and that posing difficult questions identifies the real issues. As a result, I asked what it is about testing or exploring faith in this way that enables the essence or the essential to be identified: “The barrister’s skill is identifying the right questions, and that part of my formation lives on in me, jostling with the faith that has been real since I was very young. Theology is faith seeking understanding – the book is an account of faith in which sharp questions are posed, to which (ultimately) a fairly simple ‘answer’ is offered. But that’s in the Epilogue and I wouldn’t want to give it away! Asking questions is not something for people of faith to be afraid of – but we do have to have trustworthy places to ask them and to receive answers. My dearest hope is that a reader might identify with some of the questions posed in The Infernal Word, and find answers that are at least coherent and perhaps compelling.”

Martin Luther once said that “The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn” while Thomas More wrote, “The devil…that proud spirit…cannot endure to be mocked.” Papadopulos’ talk of having fun while writing in the rebel angel’s voice reminded me that creatives from Lewis to Bono have utilised this approach, so I asked whether it one he also endorses: “The rebel angel targets humanity and specifically ‘the Christians’. They are the object of his unremitting scorn and the source of his perpetual puzzlement – why does God bother about such a crowd of undesirables? The angel’s writing is the lens through which I uncover the absurdity of God’s relationship with them.”

Mountain-tops, as significant places of encounter with God, become important in providing a structure for his book: “The choice of mountain tops was actually triggered by the need to end on one (if Golgotha counts as a mountain top). As that was the destination, I looked for precursors and, of course, there are plenty – from Ararat onwards. I could have picked a different theme: Biblical encounters in cities, or beside water. But mountains serve the purpose, as they do throughout Scripture, as places of encounter between the human and the divine.”

I ended our conversation by asking in what ways the book challenges the accepted narrative of faith by providing a fresh perspective on familiar Biblical stories and why that is needed: “I hope the book is profoundly orthodox, but it poses some of the questions about faith that have fascinated me and that I believe fascinate others. Because it’s narrated by a rebel angel it can dare to be irreverent and occasionally downright rude. Don’t we always need fresh perspectives on the tradition? That’s what keeps it alive. It was the quest for a fresh perspective that first pushed me in the rebel angel’s direction when I was stuck for a sermon.”

The Infernal Word: Notes from a Rebel Angel is published by Canterbury Press.