Belief is HUGE, of course, but this isn’t just about belief.

‘Expressing yourself’, of course, is the aspiration but c’mon: saying that with little or no explanation or context is feeble, to the point of being meaningless.

The urge to entertain, is of course worthy, maybe particularly if you *really do believe* (as McCullum and Stokes just might), that it’s more important than winning.

Attacking or ‘being attacking’ is great. We all want to thrill people.

But there are buts. And those buts aren’t necessarily contingent upon the context and tradition of Test cricket, though of course this format *does have* particular, distinctive, possibly even special parameters. There is time; there is that different level of strategy, because of time/weather/the imperative towards resilience (over time) and the testing under pressure with tiredness and exposure. Mentality. Guts. Heart. Etc. Test cricket is kindof awesome…

But a note: few of us who would call out that England first innings as a kind of classic of Bazballtastic feebleness are doing so because of doe-eyed or rose-tinted nostalgia for Things Lost. We’re not delusionally adrift in our own memories. We are doing it because that baseball from Brooks, those errors from Root, Pope (and even Duckett and Stokes?) spoke to live, current falsehoods and weaknesses, not absence of ‘tradition’. We wonder who is taking responsibility?

Brooks got fifty but it at no stage did his approach look like it was working. At. No. Stage. He was exiting stage left in order to club tennis or baseball shots vaguely down the ground. Fine, if that works. It didn’t. He looked ungainly and frustrated as much as he looked ‘carefree’. (Carefree is closer to indulgence at this level, than is healthy. He didn’t look ‘liberated’; he looked like a bloke out of his depth – like a walking wicket). Given that Brooks is a prodigious talent, this felt wild and wasteful: and it plainly encouraged the opposition, particularly their quicks. It was also the opposite of entertaining, for England fans.

Not blaming Brooks. We can only conclude that he was given license, with that specific plan to step away and then clout, thereby disrupting the Aussies and scoring quickly. For most of us, the period had a high cringe factor and it didn’t work – obviously. (It was streaky and demoralising, surely?) The extended plan, to clatter short balls, was exposed to the point of embarrassment – that word again – as English batters went ludicrously and loosely aerial, rushing towards that inevitably dispiriting end-point. Brooks’s own mode of dismissal was every bit as shambolic (and irresponsible, and unwise?) as expected. Caught, slapping woefully.

McCullum and Stokes are better than my anger suggests to me. They are deeply and profoundly Macho Men but they do engage brains, too. I am confident they talk with both strategic brilliance and philosophical heft, to each other and to their players. And they are almost certainly rather wonderfully generous. Love that.

However, in private you do have to wonder if they do crank out the cliches about ‘playing without fear’ glibly and without qualification. How else are these tactical clangers persisting? Can it really be stubborn-ness? Or some sort of perverse siege-mentality? We’ve seen that often, in sporting environments.

Bazball needs qualification. This morning, England were neither ‘entertaining’ nor bright, nor even committed. In the particular, inescapable terms of Test cricket they were WEAK. Weak strategy, weak execution, weak in relation to smarts and resilience and intelligence. This capitulation was not worthier or more entertaining than a slow death.

Pic from The Guardian.