"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."
"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."
Harry Brook's dismissal in Adelaide signalled both individual culpability and broader systemic problems in England's cricket approach. Performative, high-risk batting emerged from a culture that prized spectacle and denial over steadiness. The Baz era eroded accountability when its disciples refused to acknowledge reckless tendencies and blamed external conditions instead. For a brief period in Adelaide England showed renewed resistance and application, but this came amid a tour already damaged by heavy defeats in Perth and Brisbane. The team's temporary fightback appeared as a belated realisation of needed responses, arriving too late to prevent an overseas Ashes collapse.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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