England and Bazball are here to save Test cricket. Maybe Australia can too

We’re here to make memories. We’re here to save Test cricket. Dream bigger. Nothing is out of reach. Also, “fuck off you fucking prick”.

The paradoxes of Bazball are already manifest, and indeed a huge part of the fun. Here we have the game of reinvention, where the only rule is to break all the rules. Play like it doesn’t matter if you win or lose, because that’s the best way to win. Dance like nobody’s watching so everyone can see what a great dancer you are. Is this still maverick thinking? Probably. It is, at the very least, an utterly engrossing spectacle.

As it was once again on a rain-shadowed third day at Edgbaston, midway through what is already an epic-scale Test. England and Australia managed a session and a bit here, on a day when another paradox presented itself. England are here to save Test cricket. In their own version of this story England are only ever the heroes. But what if they’re not?

One element missing so far from these Ashes is a genuine collision of old and new. What we haven’t had yet is some proper needle. And make no mistake, Australia are desperate to beat this Bazball England. To the extent that a beating may not be enough. Maybe only a crushing will do.

It is the only logical response to this thing, which feels from the outside like another version of the defining quality of most English sports teams, English exceptionalism, English self-mythology. “England are pricks to lose to,” Andrew Mehrtens famously pointed out, and English people have proved his point ever since by taking it as a compliment.

In the Stokes era England’s cricketers have found an even more annoying way to win. Now the English are trying to be the good guys. Not dry or cold. But fun and fiery and full of wonder. Imagine