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.

Explainer

Creed

Language

Politics

4 July 2023

6 min read

The language of politics can’t domesticate religion

Political life’s Left-Right structure fails when it tries to co-opt religious perspectives. Graham Tomlin outlines why it misses so much of what makes them interesting.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

an aerial view down in to the parliamentary chamber shows MPs sitting on benches on the left and right hand side

The UK Parliament's House of Commons chamber manifests the left-right divide.

House of Commons Twitter.

The New Statesman recently released their ‘left power list’ – “the 50 most influential people shaping Britain’s progressive politics.” As I read it through, one name caught my eye – Justin Welby. He comes in a comfortable mid-table position at no. 27, behind Gary Lineker and JK Rowling, and ahead of Gordon Brown and Marcus Rashford.

The Archbishop of Canterbury may perhaps be a strange addition to a list of left-leaning figures. Not all his predecessors have been so - his predecessor but two, George Carey, is often seen espousing views from the right. It is not accidental that the present Archbishop has served in times of a Conservative government, while George Carey held the role during the latter years of New Labour. It is perhaps the job of Archbishops to hold the government of the day to account, so perhaps not surprising that Welby is seen as a critic of the Conservatives. If the government of his time had been Labour, perhaps he would be seen very differently.

However, what got me thinking was not so much the identification of the Archbishop as left-leaning but the co-option of the Church’s voice into the wider narrative of the left-right political spectrum. The language of ‘left’ and ‘right’ dates back to the French Revolution, where, in the National Assembly, the supporters of the king sat to the right of the President, and the revolutionaries sat to his left. Subsequent governmental institutions in France continued the seating arrangements and the language became embedded in political discourse far beyond France. Since then the ‘left’ has always been associated with ideas such as freedom, progress, equality and reform. The ‘right’ has valued older institutions of social life such as family, locality, individual responsibility, duty, tradition and so on.

Left and Right... shoe-horns religion into the procrustean bed of a political ideology that cannot do justice to its true nature.

Left and Right is a structure of political life with which we are very familiar. But when it comes to co-opting religious perspectives, it misses so much of what makes them interesting. It has no place for God, for revelation, for prayer, the mystical and the miraculous, the hosts of angels, the language of virtue or the surprising delight of grace. It shoe-horns religion into the procrustean bed of a political ideology that cannot do justice to its true nature. It emasculates it of all that makes it interesting and distinct.

This attempt to domesticate religion has a long pedigree. The Christian Church was born into a world dominated politically by the Roman empire, and religiously by paganism. This new claim that the God behind all things had revealed himself in the person of Jesus Christ was definitely awkward, but by and large, pagans were happy to fit it into their view of the world, if only the Christians were happy to regard Jesus as yet one more god alongside the other gods – a private option for those who preferred that kind of god, as opposed to Jupiter, Mercury or Aphrodite. The early Christians however refused to comply. They insisted Jesus was God, not just a god. They resisted their founder being co-opted into the pagan pantheon, or even the Roman imperial regime, refusing by and large to serve in the army if that meant killing their enemies in defiance of Jesus’ command to love them, or offering worship to the gods in civic festivals, even when their contemporaries could not understand the refusal to join in what to them was some harmless ritual to keep the gods happy.

Even more, early Christian thinkers such as Athanasius argued that the coming of Christ into the world was too seismic an intervention to be simply co-opted into existing paradigms. In particular, the Resurrection of Christ was either a gigantic hoax, or an invitation to re-think reality all over again from a new starting point - that humanity’s greatest enemy - death itself – had been defeated once and for all. As the theologian Lesslie Newbigin put it:

“At the heart of the Christian message was a new fact. God had acted in a way that, if believed, must henceforth determine all our ways of thinking. It could not merely fit into existing ways of understanding the world without fundamentally changing them. According to Athanasius, it provided a new arche, a new starting point for all human understanding of the world. It could not form part of any worldview expect one of which it was the basis.”

Thus, Christianity was bound to transcend the political structures of its time - or any time for that matter. A bold Christianity, true to itself, could not just be co-opted within an alien political or social structure – it was always going to be an awkward bedfellow with the empire.

In more recent years, a number of theologians have made the same point. Philosopher and theologian John Milbank wrote a ground-breaking book in the 1990s, Christianity and Social Theory, where he criticised the whole venture of the Sociology of Religion as domesticating Christian faith into an alien structure of thought, where society was taken as a given, and religious faith explained away by secular theoretical categories. Sociology for him was its own non-neutral theology, a rival discourse to Christianity, ‘a secular policing of the sublime’, domesticating it and reducing it to fit with the narrow categories of sociological theory.

Christianity just refuses to fit into foreign categories that try to tame it

More recently, James Mumford, in his short book Vexed, written with half an eye to the American experience, shows how again Christianity just refuses to fit into foreign categories that try to tame it, and how it consistently blows apart the moral and political packages that both left and right offer us in modern life. So, for example, the deeply Christian notion of the sanctity of life – that human life is sacred, to be respected in all its forms, and cannot be taken away by another human being - leads both to an abhorrence of unwarranted abortion (the American right cheers at this point), yet also to a restriction of the right to carry guns that take life (not so popular among the Republican base.) Conservatives prize family values, yet are happy to allow economic competition to permit zero-hours contracts that make desperate parents vulnerable to shifts in the market that mean they cannot feed their children. Christians might agree with the first, but disagree with the second. Similarly, the left prizes inclusivity, yet at the same time, promotes assisted dying, baulking at extending this inclusivity to the elderly person who would have to make an active choice to go on living, when pressure may mount to leave their money to their offspring and vacate the scene early. Again, the left champions the sexual revolution yet, despite its suspicion of economic liberalism, holds back from a critique of the consumerism of much sexual culture, that values being able to move onto new sexual partners as desire dictates.

So, Mumford argues, Christians may find themselves adopting a strange mix of beliefs and opinions – or perhaps only strange when seen from the perspective of a secular mindset – opposed to unwarranted abortion, yet in favour of gun control; in favour of family life, yet wanting economic intervention to the labour market to ensure proper pay for workers.

The point here is not so much to argue that Christians have a unique political viewpoint that is distinct from left or right, but that Christianity is more than politics. Beneath the surface of Christian political convictions, such as those that come from the Archbishop, lie (or should lie) a whole host of deeper commitments – to God, to the insights that come in prayer, to the most vulnerable in society, to a sense of a deep order and structure to the world that cannot be toyed with by progressive political fantasies, to the reality of Resurrection. None of these quite fit the simple left-right equation. The bishops may or may not be right in their political pronouncements – and there is room for debate on that, but trying to make them fit into the narrow categories of mere politics just doesn’t work. God is too big for that.