This newsletter comes to you from a kind of sporting twilight zone. At the time of writing, a ball has not been bowled in the Ashes. At the time of reading, at least one day of play will have been completed.
I feel unmoored and out of my depth. Like former England spinner Monty Panesar on quiz show Mastermind, I am groping for answers like a drunk searching for his keys and wallet.
If you missed the unexpected Panesar vs Smith episode, you can catch up on the unexpected appetiser here. It was a more conventional clash. An old-fashioned ‘war of words’. We haven’t had much of that convention in the lead in to Perth, and that’s partly down to Bazball.
English journalist Barney Ronay summed it up on ABC Sport Daily this week.
“ What's interesting about Bazball is that I'm not really sure it exists. I don't know what it is. It seems to involve talking rubbish in press conferences in a really annoying way and batting slightly more aggressively. Occasionally playing really terrible shots and that's about it really.”
“It's passive-aggressive. It's very undermining. It's sort of saying ‘that thing you really care about, we're gonna do it in a different way and we're gonna win in a way which is annoying to you because we're gonna appear not to care.’”
“Test cricket is really important to Australian people. It's part of the culture, it's part of the sense of the nation.”
“It's part of the separation from England as well, in that we will repeatedly beat you at this sport by being more disciplined, tougher. The land is harsh, the land is tough. We're products of that land, and we'll beat these Fay colonial oppressors. Then you've got this bunch of guys coming over trying to out-cool you, saying, oh, it doesn't matter as much as you make out.”
You can hear Barney’s full breakdown here.
Rather than stick my neck out and give you an analysis on something that I have not seen, I will instead point you to the excellent Corbin Middlemas, who is hosting the ABC Cricket Podcast all summer long.
If you want the best conversation on what went down on day one… here is where to find it.
