Tough on Harry Brook, yes. But we must also be tough on the causes of Harry Brook. No child is born playing performative reverse-hoicks with a Test match to be saved, just as most acts of cult-like behaviour have their roots in a smooth-talking cult-like instructor.
For England the beginning of the end of the age of Baz started when the disciples of Baz began to deny such a thing even existed; to insist that the buckle-up-and-enjoy-the-ride stuff didn’t actually exist at all, but was instead a creation of another, much worse cult, also known in this world as “the outside”.
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With this in mind, Brook’s dismissal in Adelaide was at least a tell, a moment of anti-gaslighting. No, you really didn’t imagine all that. For the England regime, a hard stop is now in sight, and in the usual way of these things, in the fire of an overseas Ashes immolation. But at least we got a moment here, an epitaph for an era, albeit one that was incoherent, misspelt and appeared to have been scrawled on a hotel napkin with a frankfurter.
It came just as it seemed something else might be happening. The French have a phrase, l’esprit de l’escalier, to describe the sudden realisation of what you should have said all along, the riposte you only think of when you’re already halfway down the stairs.
For three hours in Adelaide, England seemed to be producing their own cricket de l’escalier, bristling suddenly with resistance and application but doing this on the exit stairs of a burning building that has already been flame-throwered in Perth and Brisbane. So now you want to fight?
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It always felt like the prelude to another, deeper shade of pain. The first two Tests of England’s Ashes tour had felt like watching some theatrical reality TV humiliation. Put your head inside this box filled with kangaroo mucus. Watch Will Jacks bowling two hours of half-trackers. Crawl through a giant millipede anus while stabbing yourself in the eye with dingo toenails.
But they found something else here, a way to die slowly. Zak Crawley produced his most restrained Test match innings, as England moved doggedly to 177 for three in the 48th over. At which point the day felt like a quietly pointed, very English rejection of the code that has governed this team. The chandelier may have already fallen from the ceiling. The cannons are taking chunks out of the walls. But we can still brush the dust from our wing collar and continue to pass the port to the left.
At which point, enter Brook, who is deep in it, an entire Test career played out around this regime, and who appears to be still fighting the second world war from inside a small copse. Brook and Crawley were putting pressure on the bowlers simply by surviving. The end of the day had begun to loom. This was England’s best batting of the series. At which point Brook did the thing.
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From over the wicket Nathan Lyon pitched a ball just outside off stump. Before it had been released, Brook was already sliding down on to one knee, turning his shoulders, ready to reverse slash towards what was now deep fine leg. The ball dipped, because Lyon does make it drop. It turned, because Lyon also makes it turn. The ball missed the bat, ripped past Brook’s back leg as he fell over, and hit leg stump.
And, yes, this dismissal will be howled over. It will be described as stupid, arrogant and entitled, mainly because it was. This was not just an ugly shot, but a misguided one, high-risk where risk was already quite high enough. Brook was putting pressure back on Lyon by not getting out to him. This was a way to put pressure on his own own teammates instead. Suddenly Lyon was pepped and zinging it down, the energy of the day transformed.
Does it really matter in the wider picture? A world-record fourth-innings chase was not realistically going to happen. England will lose this game by 180 runs or so. In doing this they will probably have played up to the limit of their own capacities against a superior Australia bowling attack. One failed swish is not where the Ashes were lost.
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But it was still a perfect demonstration of how; of talent being wasted; of game situations thrown away; and of how scrambled and strange some of the messaging is. Mainly it was the most predictably unpredictable moment. England’s style has been about this, a performative individualism that feels increasingly mannered. There are other kinds of excitement out there. Sometimes you can actually cook a meal rather than just sending out for a chicken box on a moped.
It does feel like a point of crisis is in train here, not least for Brook, who has dined out on his Test average without actually posting any defining interventions against the better teams. Run towards the danger. As long as that danger is Pakistan on a fully asphalted road or New Zealand in New Zealand. He can be so much better than this.
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England will almost certainly – no, certainly – lose this game on day five and the Ashes before Christmas. But at least we had a piece of undeniable evidence here. Joe Root and Jeetan Patel have suggested this week that the system previously known as Bazball was some kind of media construct. What have I been watching then?
What in that case does Brendon McCullum actually do? Because it’s definitely not coaching, scheduling or attention to detail. If not big-picture thinking, what do we actually need him for? Is the cost of getting rid of McCullum now reason enough to keep him? Should 2-0 become 5-0 in January, the last really Baz move on the board would be to take matters into his own hands.
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