Preamble: In which we learn to resist the gravitational pull of the LinkedIn-industrial complex.
Somewhere around the third paragraph of every sports essay, there’s a moment where the writer pivots to business lessons. “And just like Steve Smith at the crease, your brand needs to leave the balls that don’t serve the strategy…” You can feel it coming. Maybe I just spend too much time on LinkedIn. The desperate reaching for applicability. The need to monetise the observation.
Fuck that.
What follows is about cricket. Test cricket, specifically. The 2024-25 Ashes, in which Australia beat England 4-1 in a systematic humiliation that was somehow both predictable and exquisite.
I’m writing this because I spent so much time at home in Stockholm listening to it – when my kid was sick, when I was cleaning up the kitchen – and it reminded me of summer, and Christmas.
And because I’m Australian and therefore pathologically invested, and because Test cricket – in its stubborn, archaic, gloriously inefficient way – is the most antithetical thing to Tiktok brain that we have in 2026. But I’m getting ahead of myself….
Part I: The Veblen Good of Five Days: In which we learn that wasting time on purpose is the last remaining status symbol.
The most expensive thing in the attention economy isn’t content. It’s the refusal to consume it.
Test cricket takes five days. Sometimes it doesn’t produce a result. The ball gets bowled approximately 540 times per day, and a big percentage of those deliveries are deliberately ignored – the batter lifting his bat, letting the ball pass, choosing not to engage.
This is called “leaving.” It is the sport’s most counter-cultural act.
In Perth, during the first Test, Steve Smith faced 124 balls in the first innings for 17 runs. One hundred and twenty-four balls. He left many of them. He defended most of the rest. He scored off about fifteen. This is not entertaining in any conventional sense. It is, however, expensive. It costs time – Smith’s, the bowler’s, yours if you’re watching.
In an era where every digital platform is optimised to compress experience into consumable units, Smith was doing something radical: he was wasting your time on purpose. And by wasting it, he was winning.
Thorstein Veblen would have understood. A Veblen Good is something that becomes more desirable as it becomes more expensive – a Birkin bag, a Patek Philippe, a first-class plane ticket.
The value is in the inefficiency. Test cricket is a Veblen Good of time. The fact that it takes five days – that it demands five days, with no guarantee of resolution – is not a bug. It’s the product.
England, under the “Bazball” philosophy of coach Brendon McCullum and captain Ben Stokes, tried to disrupt this. They wanted to compress Test cricket, to speed-run it, to produce results faster and more entertainingly. They attacked from ball one. They treated defence as legacy code to be deprecated.
In Adelaide, chasing 435, England were 177 for 3. A platform. A chance. Then: 194 for 6. Then: all out. Because they’re shit. The acceleration that was supposed to be their advantage became their collapse vector. They hadn’t built anything that could hold.
Australia won by 82 runs. They did it by being slow. And it drove the English crazy.
Part II: Hostile UX and the Power Users – In which we learn that boredom is a bouncer, and England didn’t make the guest list.
Test cricket’s boredom is a feature. The long passages without action, the tactical adjustments invisible to the untrained eye, the fifth day’s attritional grind – these are filters.
They separate the “casuals” from the “power users.” If you can’t sit through Mitchell Starc bowling seven consecutive dot balls to set up a single yorker, you don’t deserve the yorker.
This is Hostile UX. And like all Hostile UX, it creates loyalty. The people who make it through the friction become devotees. They understand the game in a way that demands the friction to teach.
Australian cricketers are raised in this friction. They do 10,000 hours of grade cricket in suburban Perth before they touch a baggy green. They understand the waiting because the waiting is where they learned the game.
Smith’s trigger movement – that weird, twitchy shuffle across the stumps that looks like a man having a small seizure – or Peter Garret from Midnight Oil dancing – wasn’t designed in a lab. It evolved through thousands of hours of leaving balls in club cricket, making minute adjustments, surviving.
England’s batsmen, by contrast, were optimising for drinking engagement. Harry Brook played shots that would look brilliant in a highlights package. Zak Crawley attacked with intent. It was content-first cricket.
The problem is that Test cricket doesn’t care about your content. Test cricket cares about whether you can survive the new Kookaburra ball at the Gabba when it’s seaming both ways and Pat Cummins is staring at you like you owe him money.
Brisbane. Second Test. England collapsed from 65 for 1 to 164 all out. Then again to 172. Starc took wickets. So did Josh Hazlewood. So did Cummins. The English batsmen played shots because playing shots was the doctrine.
They got out because getting out is what happens when you play shots at balls you should leave. It’s also the kind of play that manifests when you think that the conditions are too trying, so you may as well smack it while you can.
Part III: The Enshittification of English Cricket – In which we learn that removing the load-bearing walls makes for great content and structural collapse.
Cory Doctorow coined “enshittification” to describe what happens when platforms strip away user value to juice metrics. First they’re good to users. Then they abuse users to be good for advertisers. Then they abuse everyone to extract maximum profit.
Bazball was Test cricket’s enshittification.
The logic was seductive: defence is boring. Draws are boring. Blocking is boring. So let’s remove the boring parts! Let’t take the game and the conditions on. Let’s optimise for entertainment! Let’s make Test cricket fun!
The problem is that defence isn’t boring. Defence is utility. It’s the load-bearing wall of the architecture. When you remove load-bearing walls because they’re “not performing,” the building collapses. Usually around over 30 of the first innings.
Melbourne. Boxing Day Test. England: 110 all out. One hundred and ten. In a Boxing Day Ashes Test. At the MCG. The biggest stage English cricket gets outside of Lord’s, and they couldn’t even make it interesting. They still won the game but only because Australia was sleeping having sealed the series in the previous game.
The stats tell the story: only three English batsmen averaged over 30 for the series. Jacob Bethell (51.25) and Joe Root (44.44) did it by – wait for it – occasionally leaving balls and building innings. Everyone else was launching the attack sequence from ball one and wondering why they kept dying on level two.
McCullum admitted, in the post-series press conferences, that players had gone “off script” and that England might have “overprepared” for the first Test. This is corporate language for “our strategy didn’t survive contact with reality.”
It’s the kind of thing you say when you’ve shipped a product that nobody wants and you need to blame execution rather than the roadmap. It’s also total bullshit.
I listened to lots of podcasts at the time. Michael Vaughan, never one to miss a hot take, called England’s approach “too predictable.” Kevin Pietersen said the batsmen weren’t “tuned into Test cricket anymore.”
They were right, but they were describing the symptom, not the disease. The disease was the belief that you could strip the utility out of a product and still have a product.
England didn’t lose because they attacked. They lost because they forgot why defence existed.
Part IV: Algorithmic Hubris, or, Thinking Vibes Can Beat the New Ball – In which we learn that positive energy cannot stop a 145kph inswinger, no matter how hard you manifest.
Here’s what I love about the new Kookaburra ball in Australian conditions: it doesn’t care about your mindset.
Bazball’s core thesis was that attitude could overcome conditions. That if you just believed hard enough, if you walked out with intent, the ball would behave. This is algorithmic hubris – the delusion that branding can override physics.
Mitchell Starc took 31 wickets in the series. He took them because he’s Mitchell Starc, because he bowls fast and accurately, and because the ball was swinging. “Intent” doesn’t help you when a 145kph inswinger is crashing into your pads before you’ve completed your premeditated drive.
In Adelaide, Cummins expressed surprise at England’s approach – particularly their lack of intent on day two, when conditions had eased. This is revealing. Even the Australian captain, a man not prone to trash talk, couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. England had one gear. They couldn’t adapt.
The phrase “positive energy” was used a lot in English press conferences. Ben Stokes talked about being proud of how they played. McCullum talked about sticking to the process. It was the language of a startup in denial – the kind of thing you hear at an all-hands meeting three weeks before the layoffs.
Cummins, a man who drank one beer over the five game series, by contrast, spoke in press conferences like a man filling out a tax form. Light on charisma. No slogans. Just: “We hit good areas. The bowlers executed. We’ll try to do it again tomorrow.” This is the language of operations. It doesn’t inspire. It doesn’t trend. It wins.
Part V: The Cultural Psychosis Double-Header – In which we learn that both nations are in therapy, but only one of them has the Ashes.
Let me be clear: I’m Australian, and I’m writing about Australia winning. The bias is not subtext. It’s text. But I’m also aware that both nations involved in this series are, in their own ways, psychologically unwell. And cricket is just the arena where the symptoms manifest.
England’s Pathology: The Dunkirk Retention Strategy
England fetishises heroic failure. Dunkirk wasn’t a victory – it was a catastrophic military retreat that got rebranded as national mythology. The 1966 World Cup happened sixty years ago, and they still haven’t shut up about it. The English genius is for losing beautifully and then dining out on the loss for generations.
Bazball was dangerous because it threatened to take this away. For about eighteen months, England were winning. Chases were completed. Tests were won. And something broke in the national psyche. You cannot bond over triumph the way you bond over shared suffering. The English pub ecosystem is built on “bloody hell, not again.”
The 4-1 series loss will, I predict, be the beginning of England’s healing. They can now return to their natural state: complaining about selection, questioning the coaching staff, and writing long columns about what went wrong. This is the national sport. Cricket is just the pretext.
Australia’s Pathology: The Lucky Country Fragility
The Australian national brand is “she’ll be right, mate.” Casual confidence. No worries. This is a lie.
Australia in cricket is a monopoly brand. And monopoly brands cannot process disruption. When market share drops, they don’t reflect – they rage.
We pretend to be laid-back, but we booed English players at the MCG after sealing the series. We instituted the most elaborate sledging culture in world sport because silence felt like weakness. Sandpapergate – the ball-tampering scandal of 2018 – wasn’t an aberration. It was what happens when a team is so terrified of losing that they’ll cheat rather than confront the possibility.
Donald Horne coined “Lucky Country” as an insult. Australia, he argued, was a nation that succeeded despite itself, coasting on natural resources rather than genuine innovation. But we adopted it as a compliment because the alternative – admitting we might be ordinary – is intolerable.
Nathan Lyon had to intervene during the 2023 Ashes at Lord’s, when the Bairstow stumping controversy spilled into the lunchroom and tensions nearly became physical. MCC members were suspended for abusing Australian players in the Long Room. This is what happens when cricket becomes a proxy war for national self-image.
Both nations are broken. Australia just happens to be better at cricket.
Part VI: Operations Ate Strategy for Breakfast – In which we learn that Pat Cummins is not a brand but a supply chain, and the warehouse is fully stocked.
While England was producing manifesto content – bold declarations about “changing the way Test cricket is played” – Australia was doing logistics. Talent pipeline from Sheffield Shield. Bowling rotations. Workload management. Bench depth.
When Cameron Green was injured, Australia had Mitchell Marsh. When Josh Hazlewood needed rest, Scott Boland (Victorian!) slotted in and took wickets. When Cummins himself missed Perth with a back injury, the system absorbed it. England’s depth? Hope and vibes.
This is the “Operations vs. PR” distinction. England was a brand campaign. Australia was a warehouse.
The Tall Poppy Audit is an Australian cultural tradition: cutting down anyone who gets too big for their boots. It’s not jealousy. It’s regulation. And Bazball’s valuation, by the time the Ashes arrived, was trading at 300x fundamentals. The hype was astronomical. Australia looked at the P/E ratio, saw it was based on vibes and a few wins against middling opposition, and issued a market correction.
4-1. Price corrected. Carry on.
Part VII: Terroir and Decay – In which we learn that 7mm of grass and 147 years of history is a moat no startup can cross.
The SCG pitch on Day 5 of a Test match is not the same pitch as Day 1. The cracks have widened. The footmarks have formed. The ball is doing things it wasn’t doing on Tuesday.
This is terroir – the winemaking concept that the environment creates uniqueness. The Gabba is not the MCG, it is not Adelaide Oval. Each ground has its own physics, its own history, its own way of rewarding patience or punishing arrogance.
You cannot standardise this. You cannot scale it. You cannot replicate it in the Metaverse.
A curator prepares pitches with the care of a winemaker. Seven millimeters of grass. A nice roll. Covers on and off depending on weather. The pitch is first-party data that cannot be scraped, exported, or globalised.
Australian cricketers absorb this terroir over decades. They know how the Gabba pitch seams on morning one, how Adelaide flattens out, how Sydney turns on Day 4. English tourists, no matter how talented, are visitors in someone else’s data set.
Nathan Lyon, 37 years old, has taken 550 Test wickets by understanding that entropy is his ally. The pitch decays. Conditions change. And if you’ve spent your career bowling to footmarks at the SCG, you know exactly where to land the ball when the rough appears.
Bazball wanted to impose the logic of digital media – static, scalable, identical everywhere – onto something profoundly analogue. The algorithm doesn’t work here. Just a pitch, slowly dying, and whoever reads the obituary first wins.
Part VIII: In Conclusion, Absolutely No Takeaways – In which we learn that the author will now parody the very thing he despises, then back away slowly.
I promised I wouldn’t do this. I promised no “lessons” section. But because the temptation is so strong – because I can feel the pull to monetise this – I’m going to acknowledge it by parodying it.
11 REASONS WHY TEST CRICKET IS LIKE TOP-OF-FUNNEL BRAND AWARENESS
- Both require patience that nobody has anymore.
- The metrics are confusing and easily gamed.
- Leadership will ask why you’re not doing T20 instead.
- England’s approach was basically “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas.”
- Australia’s approach was basically “we’ve tried the same thing for twenty years and it still works.”
- Pat Cummins is the CMO who never speaks in meetings but somehow the numbers keep going up.
- Bazball was the pivot to video.
- The Leave is the “we’ll get back to you” email that protects your calendar.
- Day 5 pitches are like Google algorithm updates: nobody knows what’s happening but suddenly everything is different.
- Steve Smith’s technique looks like a wireframe that never got designed.
- If you want engagement, you have to earn it. And earning it takes five days, not five seconds.
I’ve just done the thing I said I wouldn’t do, but I’ve done it badly enough that it doesn’t count.
But let’s wrap this up before the batters start complaining about the light.
We are drowning in content. The machines extrude it. The platforms demand it. Every day, another million posts generated by models trained on everything, producing output that sounds like thought and means nothing. The slop economy is fully operational.
Test cricket cannot be slopped. You cannot prompt a Day 5 pitch into existence. You cannot algorithmically generate the silence before a delivery, 90,000 people holding their breath on Boxing Day.
The Leave – Smith watching a ball pass, choosing inaction – is defiance against a world demanding constant engagement. In an attention economy that wants everything now, it’s a middle finger raised in slow motion.
The faster the world gets, the more beautiful the slow things become. The more the machines write, the more we hunger for the irreducibly human.
Test cricket is irreducibly human. That’s why it matters.
//A 🦘