Bazball buried was never meant to look like this. Faced with the fierce Adelaide sun and working with an Australian onslaught which demonstrated brutality as well as in-the-grass legalism, the grand revolution of the Test of England was turned into a question of life and death, and Ben Stokes was left a single embodiment and a contradiction. What happened on the second day of the third Test, then, was no running innings of freedom or fearlessness, but a running-innings of pain, pride and the discomforting feeling that something really basic was over with.
First came the physical toll. A Mitchell Starc bouncer slammed into the back of the head of Stokes. A Cameron Green delivery was hurled inhumanly on his knee. Well before it was four hours that Stokes was stuck in the middle and being soaked to a point that every delivery was made with a towel as the only shield. hamstrings went tight, hips went to complain, knees meant to have mercy, and arms were aching with exhaustion. But the soul, like it frequently does with Stokes, would not fissure. When 48,849 spectators waited the hand of his dismissal it was like making England absolutely dependent on his very presence.
Nevertheless, beneath all the brilliance, Australia, in her turn, was the more deeply mortified England. The situation was near ideal to hit. Such a surface might have been fain desired by England greats, the opportunity to reduce to obviously below the par 371 of the first-innings of Australia. Instead, England had made it give the appearance of being extremely out of their reach. Wickets were not lost on aggressive error, but on hesitant indecision, all the top five save Ollie Pope having been dismissed with mediocre strokes which introduced no great danger.
The contradiction was the person of Stokes himself. The founder and leader of Bazball was at the least doing the reverse of what the philosophy taught he was doing. Even his 45 off 151 balls was not a pressure innings but a resistance one. Strike rate was kept in the low twenties and finally reached 29.80 which was an uncomfortable figure next to the rhetoric of ceaseless attack. This method was actually the same approach that Bazball was supposed to substitute. England played the game of possum and held the score card in stay.
But this was they, motionless and descending.The burden of the words that had been said only increased the present. Stokes imposed the same question in 2023, saying that a young Alastair Cook would not fit in this England side, suggesting that conservative batters had their place in another age. It was time now, in what would prove either a must-win Test of Ashes, that would come to define this period, that Stokes should be in the same old-school defiance. It had to be, but it was exposing. This was no philosophy, it was damage control.
In case cricket is cyclical, England are shown to be in the tightest turn. The first chapter of Bazball was successful, since it must have been an antidote to a fear, to stagnation, to a side broken by failure. Its worth could be traced in 13 out of 18 Tests. However, that has been accompanied equally by losses and in Adelaide the second incarnation of the concept crumbled at the altar. In the series which, starting with Australia, brought the movement into existence in the first place, England were at a loss.
Lastly, we had the image of man that lingered with us. Stokes found it difficult even to drink carbonated carbohydrates that were brought out to keep him going as the day dragged. He had eaten a lot already, was tired and sore-looking enough to prove he was unwell, and here was a man trying to support an idea which could not support itself any longer. Jofra Archer and he draggedged England to the stumps with two wickets still alive, so technically the Ashes were alive, but in truth the ending was near at hand.
To bury, does not mean to be useless. It implies that it has made its boundaries open. The lesson was once again taught by Stokes who showed that resistance does count. Now the question is, is England going to get a lesson out of this reckoning, or shall this Ashes be one of the landmarks in which the noble experiment they undertook ultimately exhausted its path?
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