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.

Mapmaking our meaning in a modern world

Real ‘reasoning’ happens only when we have learned to trust one another.

Rowan Williams

A hand holds a pen over a map, at the side is closed journal and colour pencils.

Oxana v on Unsplash.

People first began to think about theology not because they were looking for intellectual stimulus or solutions to abstract problems, but because they found themselves living in an unsettling and vastly expanded ‘space’. They were conscious of new dimensions in their connection with each other, new dimensions in coping with their own fear, guilt, despair, a new sense of intimate access to the limitless reality of God. They connected these new experiences with the story of Jesus of Nazareth, executed by the Roman colonial government, reported by his closest friends as raised from death and present with them and their converts in the communication of divine ‘spirit.’ As we read Christian scripture, we are watching the first generations of Christian believers trying to construct a workable map of this unexpected territory.

When I started writing the assorted pieces that make up the little book on Discovering Christianity (published earlier this year), my hope was above all to convey something of this sense of Christian thinking as a process of mapmaking in a new and bewildering landscape. That’s why one chapter – originally drafted for a Muslim audience – tried to list some of the things that an interested observer might spot in looking from outside at the habits of Christian believers: not first and foremost their spectacular and uniform embodiment of unconditional divine love (if only), but just the sorts of things they said and did, the sort of language used about Jesus, the rituals of induction and belonging. Indeed, if there is one biblical text I had in mind in virtually all the chapters, it is the simple phrase, ‘Come and see’ that Jesus uses in St John’s gospel when he is first followed by those who will become ‘disciples’, literally ‘learners.’

‘Come and see’. When we use language like that in everyday life, we’re encouraging others to share something that has excited or troubled us (or both). It’s not a proposal for solving a problem. It’s not even a recruitment campaign. It’s an invitation to stand where someone else is standing and look from there. In the rich symbolic context of John’s gospel, it’s about sharing Jesus’ ‘point of view’ – which is, as we’re told right at the start of the gospel, a point of view unimaginably close to the heart of eternal life and reality itself.

We can only see in this way when we move away from our ordinary perceptions a bit. Just as we can only learn to swim when we have jumped into the water, so we shan’t learn what faith is all about until we have been prodded by whatever forces around us to take the risk of trusting that (so to speak) the ground is going to hold beneath us if we step forward (I like to speak sometimes about discovering what images, ideas, perspectives and relations are ‘load-bearing’ in our lives).

So part of the invitation is also about telling the stories of those who have taken that kind of risk and what sort of lives they have shaped for themselves in the light of it. There is little point in summoning others just to share my individual set of feelings. But there is perhaps more weight is saying, ‘A lot of people have felt this shape beneath the surface, this grain running through things.’ Which is why – as the book seeks to explain – theology works with the ‘classical’ shared texts that most Christian communities found themselves reading together in the first hundred years after Jesus; and works also with the history of the arguments and diverse perceptions that reading brought into focus.

We read and think in company; our theological reflection like the rest of our lives of faith is a shared, ‘conversational’ affair.

It's not unknown outside theology. We have become so much more interested over the last few decades in how to understand works of art not just in terms of what the artist ‘meant’, but in terms of what the actual work does or makes possible. What world does it create? So we read the Bible, obviously, but we also read the readers of the Bible (think of the Jewish Talmud, with the original text of its classical legal discussions literally surrounded on every page by the arguments that this text has generated). We read and think in company; our theological reflection like the rest of our lives of faith is a shared, ‘conversational’ affair. And so along with reading the Bible and immersing ourselves in the history of what sense others have made of the basic text and story, we also bring to bear the sorts of things that are part of our current conversations in society and culture – the habits of ‘reasoning’ that we have picked up.

There is an important difference between talking about ‘reason’ as a sovereign, detached capacity and talking about ‘reasoning’, the range of processes and practices that carry forward a common life of intelligent learning (and that learning may be at any level of supposed ‘intellectual’ capacity; once more, it’s not about abstractions). Our society these days is fairly comprehensively confused about this: we have a mythological picture of some supremely obvious way of arguing that allows for no final dispute; we call it ‘science’; and then we expect the impossible of it and are disillusioned and sceptical when it can’t give us absolutely certain answers. One of the many ironies of our society is that we are besotted with ‘science’ and at the same time fascinated by the idea that there are many ‘truths’, or else suspicious that apparently objective sources are actually controlled by other interests. Real ‘reasoning’ happens only when we have learned to trust one another’: a long story, but an all-important element in our human discovery.

Bible, tradition, human reasoning – those are the tools we bring to this job of mapmaking. The book is really just a meditation on those words, ‘Come and see’, as the basis of Christian thinking. At the centre of everything is a set of very ambitious claims about what God is like – and what we are like. Part of what we’re invited to ‘come and see’ is ourselves. Once again it’s not unlike what happens in a really good play or film, when we go away conscious that we have seen not just someone else’s story but something fresh about our own selves.

And my greatest hope for the book is that it may prompt someone to look a bit harder, to listen in to how Christians talk – and in that moment find that they recognize what’s being said in some complicated and untidy way. One of the most vivid characters in the gospel I’ve been quoting says of Jesus that he has told her everything she has ever done. I hope that those who are moved to investigate a bit further will come to that same unsettling and exciting point where they see themselves freshly, and the new landscape begins to unfold.

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