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The Life Cycle of a Cult
1. The Big Idea. A charismatic leader or leaders propose a new and transcendent idea that promises a panacea for alienated and vulnerable people.
So here we are then. They’re getting ready to storm the compound down in Brisbane. The gunships are circling. Smoke is rising from the out-houses. A lone figure, naked, shivering, the words HIGH RELEASE POINT smeared across his chest in chicken blood, has come staggering through the lines and is being led away under a blanket towards an inconclusive loan stint at Derbyshire.
Do you ever miss the early days, when the world was still young? The days of Bazball 1.0, of Bazball without brains.
2. Love-Bombing. Cult leaders promise a new start, hope for a future, love, salvation within a community who all believe in the big idea.
What was this thing back then? Just men on a balcony feeling good. Tattoos. Forearms. Jawlines. Elite male wellness energy. Oh sure, England’s players will claim Bazball doesn’t actually exist (“We don’t use that word”), which is funny because if it doesn’t exist what exactly did I just watch?
But we know what it is. It’s Harry Brook playing a shot so depraved it has to be pixelated. It’s the thrill of Ben Stokes in his final form, a look that says: pensive Nordic god, beard made of wood, hair woven from beaver hide, so authentically Modern Savage you half-expect to look down and notice he’s fielding at mid-off stripped to the waist and cradling a wild salmon.
It’s Ben Duckett still being allowed to talk in press conferences, out there looking like a happy little woodland creature in a waistcoat, saying stuff like we are actively deconstructing the orange. And yes, the energy, for quite a long time, was only good energy.
3. A New Life. Growth phase. Unity enforced by rote learning of the cult’s slogans. These beliefs are often illogical as a test of “true belief”.
Is it just me? The backlash, the outrage, the sense of betrayal after the first Ashes Test defeat seems too strong, too much. England batted badly in Perth, as they often do in Australia. They were savaged in the field for a couple of hours as the bowling and captaincy fell apart, carved around by Travis Head batting like England but better, adaptive to conditions, a man playing with a kind of light around him.
And now we have this, the pile-on, the rage, the sense of English Test cricket as a kind of abomination. The feeling seems to be that England don’t just need to lose from here, they need to lose righteously, to be scoured, flame-throwered, destroyed by the vengeful purity of Mitchell Starc’s movements, the low-fi orthodoxies of Scott Boland, out there celebrating his wickets with a bashful smile like he’s just been given a nice new fishing rod. What will this do to them?
4. Hate Bonding. Problems arise from failures in the plan. But the cult cannot admit errors. It starts to feed on hatred of the outside world.
The fact remains, half a week out from the second Test, we have now reached a delicious point of tension in the lifespan of this thing. England could quite easily win in Brisbane in a blur of adrenal disruption. More likely, they could lose just as quickly. And if they do lose it feels like we really might be entering the death cult phase.
Before that happens there are two things worth saying about this. More than two years ago, back in those heady early days of light and heat, I wrote an article suggesting Bazball was a cult. People were very angry about this, which was helpful because everyone knows the best way of proving something definitely isn’t a cult is when its acolytes send hundreds of furiously one-eyed messages objecting to the questioning of its truths.
What has happened in the last few days is just as interesting. It seems that hating Bazball has now become the cult. We have a uniformly angry internet, angry English pundits, shots of angry middle-aged travelling fans cheated out of three days of cricket, like a room full of timeshare owners seeking justice.
On the other we hand we have the wider backdrop of Australia’s more nuanced, more culturally hard-wired exasperation at these weirdly passive-aggressive buccaneers, out there saying, hey, that thing you love and have fostered and nurtured as one way of separating yourself culturally from us, well, it’s all a bit of a gag in the end old boy.
And this is the real point. It’s all cults. Bazball was a cult because cricket is a cult. Or at least, English cricket has always been a cult, a clique, a garden party, a closed world with two hundred years of opaque and ritualistic cult history behind it. This has always been a place where power and access are hoarded. It’s the colonial game of the British, the original sports washers. And guess what, Britain is itself a cult, a series of esoteric hierarchies, a place that literally still has a king.
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England’s cricketers have been sealed up within this world since childhood. In trying to escape from it, to create a less brutal environment, they are simply replicating their own experience, creating another a bubble, a closed circle, but doing it this time with 15 cool guys and a coach who wants you to be yourself as long as yourself is quite a lot like myself.
Live where your feet are. Run towards the danger. But no matter how fast and far you run, you’re always basically in the same place.
With this mind, it is perhaps the moment to have some sympathy for Bazball, to appreciate its good points, of which there are many. What is Bazball? Creating a sense of freedom. Challenging orthodoxies. Batting aggressively and trying to take 20 wickets. It makes sense as a tactic if the short aggressive game is your best chance of winning.
Plus there is the emotional side. The style, attitude and occasional mania of Bazball can be interpreted, as Mike Brearley has noted, as an active response to depression. It is easy to forget what a miserable place England Test cricket had become, or how the dynamic of the last four years leads directly from the last Covid-shadowed Ashes tour, a genuinely dark time for many of those present.
If the Bazball optics suggest a kind of male wellbeing cult, then male wellbeing is good. Ben Stokes talking openly about doubt and low times, while simultaneously occupying the role of heroic and successful England captain: this is new and useful. Men are often miserable, and miserable alone, more miserable than they need to be.
Plus defeat here really wouldn’t be that damning. The key questions have always been: have they got better? And is it more interesting? England can lose 4-1 in Australia and the answer on both counts is still yes.
There are of course bad bits. A failure to learn or adapt, the sense that this movement only has one move, rejecting the previous movement, at which point it becomes a static entity.
At times Bazball is boring. Trying to be interesting all the time is one of the most boring things you can do. But even here it remains unignorable. England have played two days of Test cricket in the last four months. Has any sporting entity existed so vividly in the imagination either side of almost total non-activity?
So what now? The timeline suggests the next stages are Witch-Hunts and Persecution Paranoia, which both, let’s be honest, sound pretty mouthwatering. This is followed by Final Conflict, whereby the cult “either destroys itself or lashes out against its fantasised enemies”.
Well, hopefully we won’t get there. This is in the end a group of people trapped within their own strange colonial hangover of a sport, something so moreishly beautiful it remains impossible to look away or resist. There is still time before this cult within the cult is done to burn a few more sticks of furniture, to create a sense of heat and light, to make everyone around the edges feel something.
