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.

Article

Belief

Creed

Ethics

Politics

20 October 2025

7 min read

The Danish Prime Minister is right - the West needs a spiritual rearmament

Christianity should challenge, not reflect, the cultural zeitgeist

Graham Tomlin

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

Mette Frederiksen gesture as she delivers a speech.

Mette Frederiksen speaking at Aalborg University.

Aalborg University.

For some time, there has been a sense of crisis in Europe. You can feel it. European nations are re-arming themselves as America turns off the financial tap. They are struggling to manage levels of migration. Young people are losing faith in democracy.

Yet this is not primarily an economic crisis, or even a political or ethnic one. It is spiritual. And when you start to look for it, you see the signs of it everywhere.

Take one example. Back in the summer, Mette Frederiksen, the Prime Minister of Denmark announced a national military build-up involving increased defence spending, conscription and so on, all fuelled by the general north European fear of expansionist Russia. While speaking to a group of Aalborg University students soon after, she surprised everyone by saying:

“We will need a form of rearmament that is just as important (as the military one). That is the spiritual one.”

She spoke of the discernment needed to tell the difference between truth and falsehood in a world where they were hard to tell apart - and implied this required spiritual wisdom not more technology. Increasing levels of conscription is one thing, but persuading young Danes to fight and even die for anything is another. The problems are not unique to Denmark. Why would Gen Z fight for an economic system that doesn't seem to be working in their favour, doesn't offer them the prospect of owning a home or a stable job, and offers little to inspire any kind of heroism? John Lennon imagined a world with “nothing to kill or die for.” If there is nothing you would die for, there probably isn’t much to live for either.

Frederiksen’s call is just one sign of the spiritual crisis in Europe. Another is the rise of what is sometimes called ‘Christian nationalism’. Elites may sneer at the flags on lamp posts and the crosses held aloft in populist marches, but these are the visible signs of swathes of people in the UK who feel no-one listens to them, and who regret the loss of the cultural and broadly Christian framework that in the memory of past generations provided the operating system of British life for centuries. Its disappearance since the 1960s and the lack of anything to replace it is a problem. The ‘new atheism’ was an act of cultural vandalism, aiming to destroy faith but with nothing to put in its place. You don't have to believe that Tommy Robinson or even Nigel Farage is the answer to this yearning to recognise the validity of this sense of loss.

Yet another is what has been called the ‘Quiet Revival’ - signs of renewed churchgoing among (especially) young men in the UK. Revivals of religion usually happen when a community feels its identity and survival is under threat. At such times, people go back to their roots, to available sources of wisdom and reassurance. This isn't yet a wholesale turning to the Church, but it is sign of a yearning for some kind of spiritual meaning, for something sacred – something that can't be bought for money and that has a value beyond what we choose to give it.

So - back to Mette Frederiksen’s surprising call for spiritual renewal in her own country. Denmark is one of Europe’s most secular nations, Frederiksen is not known as a regular churchgoer, and her Social Democrat party has generally been lukewarm about religion in recent decades. Yet she was honest enough to recognise the problem. If we have told ourselves for decades that there is no such thing as truth, it's not surprising we find it hard to tell truth from falsehood. When we have confidently proclaimed that the most important voice to listen to is our own desires – ‘you be you’ – it is not surprising that that we don’t have any ideals left to live or die for. Young people might take to the streets over climate change or Palestine, but being willing to lay down their lives for something beautiful, sacred, something transcendent beyond all that - even when it has sustained their civilisation for generations? Probably not. And there is no reason to think that Denmark is any different from any other European country. The same is surely true in Britain, even if our politicians are not as perceptive as Mette Frederiksen in noticing the problem.

So where is an answer to be found? Mette Frederiksen called out to the Church for an answer:

“I believe that people will increasingly seek the Church, because it offers natural fellowship and national grounding… If I were the Church, I would be thinking right now: how can we be both a spiritual and physical framework for what Danes are going through?”

Yet herein lies the problem. The Church of Denmark, one of northern Europe’s Lutheran churches, is not exactly in a great state. 70 per cent of the population may be registered members of the church, but only 2.4 per centof those actually turn up in church on Sundays – which makes for an average of 30 people in any local Danish Lutheran church on Sunday.

In Ireland, the Roman Catholic Church ordained just 13 priests this year. Fifty years ago, 90 per cent of Irish people went to mass every week. Now it’s around 16 per cent. The decline was a self-inflicted disaster as scandals of abuse and cruelty recurred with depressing frequency. The Church of England’s attendance figures are not much more encouraging. And its ability to offer something to live and die for is far from clear. The philosopher John Gray is scathing about the western churches’ captivity to the spirit of the age. He thinks of them as “mirroring the confusion of the zeitgeist rather than offering a coherent alternative to it… this kind of Christianity is a symptom of the disease not a cure for it.”

That may be the problem - but it is also the opportunity. Christianity is the west’s default spiritual tradition. Nothing goes as deep into the European soul as this. Others come and go, but this faith is in our veins, our landscape, our art and our memory. Time and again, from its early centuries, it has inspired countless people to live lives of selfless devotion. It happened when the Byzantine empire emerged from the ruins of the Roman one, when a new medieval Christianised civilisation grew out of the ruins of the barbarian conquests, or in the reform movements of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, or the missionary movements of the nineteenth centuries. Time and time again it has proved a catalyst for wisdom to face the challenges of crisis, for individual self-sacrifice, cultural renewal and a purpose beyond personal fulfilment – something to live - and die - for.

And it still does. You only have to recall the 21 Libyan martyrs – mostly ordinary Coptic Christians from a simple Egyptian village who were captured by ISIS in 2015, and who chose a gruesome death rather than forsake their faith in the love of Christ – to show how Christian faith gives something not to kill – but to die for.

I have no doubt Christianity can provide that again. Not as a reversion to something past, but in a new form that is true to its roots, but in a way that will look new – maybe humbler, simpler, purer.

This is the challenge for such new leaders as Pope Leo and soon-to-be Archbishop Sarah Mullally. And indeed, for all of us who call ourselves Christian. Can we Christians, as John Gray put it, offer a coherent alternative to the confusion of the zeitgeist rather than be a pale reflection of it?

The future, not just of European Christianity, but also of Europe may depend on it.

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