As many predicted, England has yet again lost the Ashes in Australia. But listen closely to the criticism of the defeat and a curious vocabulary emerges. The problem, we are told, was not simply misjudgement but recklessness; not failure but irresponsibility. England did not merely lose – they behaved wrongly.
This is striking language to attach to a sporting approach. It suggests that something more than tactics or results is at stake: a sense that England should not play like this at all, even if it sometimes works. That British instinct – to recoil from assertiveness when it produces visible risk – runs far beyond cricket.
Australia’s series win has generated a familiar national mood: irritation, self-reproach, and the rapid revival of old certainties. And it comes at the same time as Donald Trump has ratcheted up his country’s assertiveness on the global stage, most strikingly in a recent military operation in Venezuela in which US forces ousted president Nicolás Maduro and brought him to face charges in the United States.
English sporting culture has long prized dignified effort over ruthless success
These two stories appear unrelated – one is sport, the other geopolitics. Yet together they expose a deeper national unease. Across the international system, boldness has become the operating norm for great powers, not only the United States but Russia and China as well. Britain, too, remains a great power by any conventional measure: nuclear-armed, globally deployed, and economically significant. Yet here boldness is treated not as a tool of influence but as a character flaw – something to be justified, hedged, or abandoned at the first sign of discomfort.
Bazball, properly understood, is not a gimmick or a reckless batting manual. It is a deliberate psychological intervention. When Brendon McCullum and Ben Stokes took charge of England’s Test side, they were not merely adjusting shot selection; they were attempting to overwrite a habit of mind. Bazball’s principles are simple and unfashionable: remove the fear of failure, prioritise winning over respectability, and accept volatility as the price of initiative. It rejects the old British bargain in which survival counts as success and draws acquire moral weight.
This approach has delivered results – and not merely statistical ones. Under Bazball, England swept New Zealand, staged a record-breaking chase to draw a series with India, recovered to beat South Africa, and completed a historic whitewash in Pakistan, all while turning Test cricket into a national event again. Crowds returned, interest revived, and a format widely assumed to be in terminal decline briefly felt urgent and alive. That the method has now collided with Australia’s pace and pressure does not invalidate the experiment. It simply exposes its costs.
The backlash, however, has been revealing. Criticism has gone well beyond the technical. Bazball is described as reckless, irresponsible, naïve, even disrespectful of conditions. This is moral language, not sporting analysis. England, the argument runs, should know better. They should play ‘properly’, even if that means losing more slowly.
This instinct runs deep. English sporting culture has long prized dignified effort over ruthless success, gallant failure over ugly victory. Trying hard is treated as an achievement in itself. Risk aversion is recoded as maturity; caution as wisdom. Bazball disrupts that settlement. It insists that agency matters more than consolation and that failure is preferable to timidity. Small wonder it feels improper.
Cricket has always functioned as a register of national psychology, and English cricket in particular reflects Britain’s post-imperial temperament: risk avoidance, status preservation, and moral consolation in defeat. When England has succeeded most decisively, it has often been by temporarily shedding these instincts and imposing itself. Such moments rarely last, because they threaten a comforting self-image, one that is principled, restrained, faintly wronged by circumstance.
This matters because the wider world is no longer organised around British sensibilities. In global politics, assertiveness now sets the tempo. The United States, for all its disorder, remains comfortable with risk. American power tolerates failure because it understands iteration: act, adjust, escalate, recalibrate. Donald Trump is not the cause of this culture but an extreme expression of it – initiative prized over consensus, momentum over decorum.
China practises a different but equally assertive model. It applies relentless pressure, accumulates advantage incrementally, and shows little interest in moral approval. Friction is not avoided but managed; tension is endured as the price of power. Both systems accept discomfort as normal. Both understand that influence belongs to those willing to move first and absorb the consequences.
‘Global Britain’, like Bazball, is less a strategy than an identity project. It is an attempt to sound confident, active and consequential without fully accepting the risks, trade-offs and failures that genuine assertiveness entails. Britain’s political class, by contrast, remains trapped in a process-heavy mindset. Governance is dominated by consultation, procedure, and risk management. Strategy is articulated rhetorically but enacted cautiously. Restraint is mistaken for wisdom; seriousness confused with caution. This is not a partisan failing but a cultural one. Across defence, trade, and foreign policy, Britain prefers careful management to decisive action.
The parallel with Bazball is exact. When boldness produces instability – a batting collapse, a diplomatic setback – the instinct is to retreat. The lesson drawn is not that assertiveness requires refinement, but that it was a mistake to attempt it at all. Process reasserts itself; agency ebbs away.
The cost of this caution is rising. In an assertive world, restraint is no longer neutral. It is structurally disadvantageous. Those who set the tempo shape the environment; those who hesitate become reactive. Assertiveness does not mean recklessness, but it does require psychological readiness: the willingness to act without guarantees and absorb failure without abandoning intent.
Bazball, for all its flaws, grasped this truth. Its real failure would not be losing in Australia but being abandoned because of the pain felt Down Under. Britain faces the same choice beyond the boundary rope. If it continues to mistake confidence for costume and caution for wisdom, it will find that others have already decided its place for it.
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