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.

Article

Belief

Creed

15 April 2025

6 min read

This pub chat brought us to tears

In the debris of the Enlightenment there’s a rising warmth to the mystical.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen.

Four people sit round a pub table, some look animated, others pensive.

gaspar zaldo on Unsplash

I recently found myself sitting in an Oxford pub, crying with a man I barely know. And I wanted to tell you about it.

How did we, two almost-strangers, find ourselves crying opposite each other?

Well…

Oh, gosh. How do I say this? We were crying because we were talking about Jesus.

We’d both been spending the week at a gathering of academics in Oxford and one sunny afternoon, we, along with the other attendees, had wandered to one of Oxford’s effortlessly enchanting pubs. We ordered a couple of their finest IPAs and found ourselves perched next to each other. I quickly gauged that this guy doesn’t dabble in small talk, so, right there - sat in battered leather armchairs and surrounded by people - we spoke to each other about Jesus. Not in any kind of academic or philosophic manner; we just sort of shared what we think of him, what we feel about him, what we wonder about him.

Ten minutes later, we had demonstrably leaky eyes.

You see, my comrade in tears and I, we’re both Christians. Over the past two-thousand-ish years, that term has come to mean a number of things – it’s become a weighted word. But what I mean when I say that we’re both Christians, is that we love Jesus.

That’s so weird to say, isn’t it? I’m resisting the urge to polish that definition up, to mop up the whimsy and make it more palatable for you. My instinct is to reach for an academic reasoning, a profound way to make what I just said sound less weird. But I’m going to resist. I’m just going to let that seemingly absurd truth blow in the wind.

Can I let you in on something, though? Something a little vulnerable? I love Jesus, but I find him hard to talk to you about. One of two things tends to happen when I try, I get emotional, or I get embarrassed. Neither feels helpful.

Let’s start with the embarrassment, because it’s easier to explain.

We live in the debris of the Enlightenment. We’re materialists, rationalists, all that we see is all that there is-ists. We want certainty, we want prove-ability, we want to stand upon the solid ground of reason. We’ve spent the last century or two valuing cold, hard, facts – not warm, soft, inklings. We’ve repeatedly traded mystery for mastery. And, because of all those things, we’ve ushered in secularism. That’s what we call ourselves, isn’t it? Secular? Those who have outgrown their need of a cosmic saviour, those who have finally burst free of the God delusion.

This story, this event, it teaches me that everything can be mended, including me.

This is my context as much as it is yours, and so, with all of that swirling around me – with secularism acting as the societal stage upon which I stand - my belief in Jesus is odd. I have spent my life feeling deeply unintelligent for believing that Jesus was all that he said he was, I can’t deny that. Secular culture has often had me feeling as though I’ve pulled up a chair, ready and excited to play the game of life, only to find that I hold an old set of instructions. Secularism screams at me, points at me, makes me feel as though I’m wearing an outfit that went out of fashion two seasons ago. And so, much to my shame, I get embarrassed. I play its game, a game I wasn’t designed to play, and I lose.

And then there’s the specificity of Jesus, right?

Even in the corners of culture where secularism is losing its grip and there’s a rising warmth to the transcendent, mystical, unexplainable things – there’s still a guard up when it comes to religion. In many cases, rightly so. People tend to feel more comfortable in the ‘spiritual, not religious’ camp. There’s something self-preserving about allusivity, isn’t there? Saying that I believe in Jesus strips me of that luxury – my association with him means that I’m also associated with two billion other people, and that can be disconcerting. It means I have little control over how I’m perceived by you, nor how I’m represented by them. It also means that my experiential spirituality is housed within a specific story, a framework, a tradition – I don’t get to pick and choose. It’s an all-in kind of thing.

So, every time someone who doesn’t know Jesus wants to talk to me about him – someone like you, perhaps - all of the above does its best to shut me up. It mostly wins and I mostly fail you. If – on occasion – I am able to rip the tape of self-consciousness from my mouth, I get frustratingly emotional. And that reaction is slightly harder to explain.

I don’t interact with Jesus as a metaphor, an archetype, or a symbol. You may think me delusional, but I’ve decided to take him at his word, to live as if he was everything that he said he was – fully God, fully human, the whole she-bang. And I take the same approach to Easter – the festival that celebrates the thing I believe to be the truest – Jesus’ resurrection. His death and subsequent un-death, what T.S. Eliot calls: ‘the still point of the turning world’. What Dr Martin Shaw regards as ‘the most extraordinary act of love, so catastrophic in its beauty, we’re still in shock two thousand years later’.

The realness of it all moves me. It, just as Martin has diagnosed, shocks me. This story, this event, it teaches me that everything can be mended, including me. It brushes against my deepest longings, it silences my loudest fears. And Jesus, the God-Man at the centre of it all? I feel the truth of him in my bones, his love courses through my veins, his friendship makes my eyes sting.

I feel silly saying all of that – knowing how such sentiments have no home in the secular world we’ve built up around ourselves. And so, I feel paralysed by the need to boil it all down to ‘five facts that prove the resurrection happened’. But I just can’t seem to master it.

Instead, I wonder if it’s alright that the truth of the event is found in two near strangers inexplicably crying in a pub. Two near strangers being unspeakably moved by the real-ness, the here-ness of a man who was executed two-thousand years ago. Two near-strangers who – despite it going against their (or, at least, my) self-aware sensibilities - were forced to accept that their tears picked up where their words had left off.

Is that kind of proof acceptable to you? After-all, I’ve never known of someone to weep over a good metaphor, an intelligent myth, or a profound philosophy.

I’m not opposed to placing the claims of Christianity under the microscope, indeed, I do it myself (when you’re not around, obviously). I’m simply opposed to it being the only means by which we can assess its truth. Afterall, I’m never more certain of its truth than when the only thing I have to show for it is an embarrassing display of tears.

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