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A few weeks ago there was a wave of newspaper interviews with the stepson of the king, Tom Parker-Bowles. These seemed at first glance to be about absolutely nothing at all, froth and chatter, a wincing man in a tweed hat talking about how he makes Sunday lunch. Why was this happening? Scanning the text for meaning, the clouds finally cleared. He was launching a cordial.
You might say, do we need … a cordial? What is a cordial? A way of ruining water. A drink that isn’t actually a drink. But this is to miss the point, and in way that is frankly embarrassing and I feel sorry for you. Because this is not any old cordial. It’s not the kind of really crappy cordial you might launch. As Parker-Bowles puts it, devastatingly: “Look, we have Belvoir and Bottlegreen. But they use concentrates. Why can’t we make a really high-end British cordial?”
Mind. Blown. You didn’t know about this. You didn’t know about the grail of the not-from-concentrate cordial. You didn’t know what we have here is a genuine seeker, product of a youth spent poring over the pans, face smeared with tears, bilberry reduction, seeking something that goes beyond cordial and into, well, art. And now we have it, after the wait, the compromises of public life, the shapes it bends you into. The dream of a concentrate-free cordial.
And yes, to some people this might sound like a bogus sales peg for a posho money-making scheme. You, the masses, might conclude what we have here is a perfect modern example of regal entitlement, captured by the fact Waitrose are already stocking Bowles O’Fruit or Royal Pith or whatever it’s called.
You might see in that syrup another distillation of why this rain-fogged island can’t grow or invigorate itself, a place where people with talent and creativity must fight for every glob of opportunity, while step- scions of royalty can launch a not-from-concentrate cordial because an afternoon with Binky in the Droit du Seigneur got out of hand.
OK. Let’s just hold on to that sense of powerlessness and rage. As they say in therapy, I want you to live in these feelings. Live in them while we move on to Bazball, which still definitely exists as long as people keep saying it does. And specifically, why Bazball, which doesn’t really matter, matters more than ever on its farewell tour.
It is definitely too quiet out there. With the Ashes three weeks away there is a sense with England’s cricketers of a loss of momentum, a deadening of the life force. Not because of being bowled out cheaply in New Zealand, which is arguably the ideal prep: play carelessly and annoy people. Job done.
But there is a dearth of talking shit. It has been a while since any of the big hits: moral victory, the way we play, saving the game. There was some brief excitement this week over a clipped-up Harry Brook seeming to say, yeah, I’d rather we got out that way (hacks, scythes, windmills), but it turned out he wasn’t really saying that.
Even the Australian newspapers seem a bit dissatisfied, trying hard this week to crank the throttle with headlines suggesting Steve Smith has SLAMMED Bazball, when he was really just saying conditions will be hard. Do we need to wheel out Ben Duckett to sit there looking like Paddington Bear has joined a cult and wants to talk to you about breast milk and automatic weapons? He’ll do it.
You aren’t really supposed to dwell on this stuff. We can be grown up instead and say it’s all pointless pre-chat. Playing in Australia is different. In that hard white light, the bleached-out greens, the familiar optics of collapse, England could easily fall apart as usual, end up 112 for seven on the first morning in Perth, which would be an interesting outcome in itself.
Plus England are not really like that any more. The days have gone when this felt like a kind of male wellness movement, a vibe, a way of standing, handsome bearded men on a balcony, the last surviving alpha-bears roaring at the sun from their shrinking block of ice. Maybe there never was a Bazball. Maybe it was only ever shit- talk and scoring quickly.
But the fact is, talking about this stuff is brilliant, moreish and now time-limited. It’s also the way England can win in Australia, by leaning into it, accepting that the only reason this thing still exists, the part that actually explains it, is the fact it really annoys Australians.
This is undeniably true. To the extent the only thing more annoying to an Australian than Bazball is English people telling them Bazball annoys them.
Let us enter the mind, for example, of David Warner, who popped up again this week looking like an angry brave plastic dinosaur, and who seems genuinely enraged and disturbed by the prospect of this England team.
Something is happening here. Imagine how you feel about Parker-Bowles’ cordial, the feelings of trapped, full-body annoyance. That’s how Warner feels about Bazball. And the reason is obvious enough. The tone of this team, its defining note, has always been a distinct strand of English exceptionalism. It is, in the most colonial of games, about colonialism.
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It really is. Bazball, which is essential paring back, removing the periphery, didn’t change cricket in England. It reduced it to its dilute form. And English cricket has always been at bottom a matter of clique-ism, a minority sport, as Mike Marqusee put it, but a minority sport for the most privileged minority.
This is presented now as punkish and revolutionary, product of a Kiwi coach and a state-school captain, like the Beatles selling rock’n’roll back to America. But it is essentially about saying we will float beyond this thing. You can win, but only in the wrong way. Or at least this is the part that hits home, that has been extracted, to the ongoing bafflement of the England dressing room.
Nobody ever actually said, seriously, that the last home Ashes draw was a “moral victory”. But this has been repeated endlessly in Australia, in part because of the imprint of that founding relationship. Red-ball cricket is precious to Australia. It is deeply formal, a place identity is asserted, where greater discipline, the hardness of the land are defining qualities.
Except, suddenly here are some blokes coming on like the 4th Earl of Wangledon, bow ties undone, quaffing cordial from the bottle, saying yeah just be where your feet are. It really does feel like Australians have never disliked an England cricket team as intently, or at least as specifically. It was easier to dislike Douglas Jardine, whose hostility was ennobling, who openly played the role of starchy Englishman, as opposed to putting you suddenly in the role of the uptight retainer of order.
This thing is more vicious than leg-side theory. It’s reinstating the gentleman amateur. It’s Zak Crawley saying I’m actually just here on a gap year. It’s the nightmare scenario, England’s players celebrating at the SCG with a bottle of non-concentrate greengage, while saying, oh sorry, did that really matter to you, no way, that’s sweet. It is also why England need to be more like this if they want to win. For example, Pat Cummins being out of the first Test is doubly massive, because Cummins is not Bazball-able, not vulnerable to attitude and vibe.
Not just because he is brilliant at jagging the ball in, which is going to do you if you’re launching stiff-kneed aristocratic drives, but because Bazball is an assertion of will, and Cummins is the ultimate alpha: intergalactic space pilot handsome, a cricketer who looks like he smells of fresh bread, perfect skincare and kindness. You can’t Bazball that.
You can’t Bazball Josh Hazlewood. He gets bounce. You’re splicing it to cover. Mainly he looks like a corn-fed GI. He looks as if he was born grimacing. Scott Boland, on the other hand, is Bazball-able. This is not a comment on his skills, just on the way he celebrates his wickets like he’s just been given a new fishing rod, the way he seems oddly tender. The idea of Boland being slapped around by these fancy boys is a terrifying prospect, essentially an act of reinvasion.
So we head towards the last great southern Ashes series before red-ball cricket finally eats itself and becomes the Ryder Cup. In this light it seems deeply fitting that England are like this. Or at least that they seem like it to their opponents, English cricket in dilute form, not from concentrate, a maddeningly high-strength version of what has always been there.
