There are no bad shots. Five balls after tea on a febrile, at times slightly hallucinogenic first day of the first Ashes Test Joe Root went down on one knee, shifted his grip, waited, then very gently and carefully reverse-nudged a ball from Scott Boland, Australia’s first-change new ball bowler, over third man for six.
This wasn’t really a ramp or a scoop, more a kind of flourish, the shot of a player seeing every detail in minute, slow-motion detail.
It was just that sort of day. Or at least it was at times, as England batted with thrilling elan on a flat, dry pitch; and at other times with a kind of woozy trapped energy, Test cricket reimagined as a kind of brown acid trip, lines blurring, colours seeming to shift and blend.
For a while the second hour of the opening session came to resemble the middle overs of a mid-1990s ODI. Suddenly there were singles everywhere. Are singles OK? Who exactly is winning here? After lunch, as Nathan Lyon produced a beautifully searching spell, the game became a tight, taut subcontinental-style grind.
Harry Brook batted for half an hour like the biggest boy in the school team. Jonny Bairstow produced a post-tea surge, swatting and clump-driving with that familiar sense of controlled rage. Moeen Ali seemed to have come out to bat in a top hat and tails, and was soon trotting off back to his carriage.
At times it felt like a Test cricket medley, a rapturously received farewell tribute, with a sense too of something being played out and processed. Ben Stokes had walked out to join Root with England at 175 for 4, a massive moment in the English Test Match summer.
Stokes ran at the ball and blocked it. Stokes went for a massive, wristy reverse sweep and missed. Stokes drove wildly, down on one knee, like a farmer unloading his blunderbuss into the treeline, and nicked to Alex Carey for one. Maybe, you know, there are some bad shots? Just, like, one or two?
And through all this Root batted beautifully, a man playing with a cold circle of light around him, all clear lines and shapes, a model of skill and orthodoxy and high grade innovation that seemed to whisper reassuring things in your ear even as the walls began to spin once again.
This was the day when England were always likely to be tested; when the new world of Stokes-McCullum, of existential cricket, Bazball against the old world, would run up against the best team on the planet.
Earlier this week Stokes had written the closest thing to a Bazball manifesto, kicking off with the point that there are no bad shots, that all of our shots are simply shots, the shots that make us, that we are all the shots we carry through life. And yes, Bazball does often sound like therapy.
It isn’t hard to see why. Cricket is pain, cricket is isolation, bruises, a lifetime of closed doors, lost moments, judgment, failure, alienation. And right now the hardest cruellest form is dying in its own light, being pushed to one side by other forms, newer empires. Why not just to try to make it feel good?
And yes, arguably a lot of the Bazball mantras and mottos, the things Stokes and McCullum actually say, sound a bit like Oasis album tracks. Be with us. Drink the moment. Where your feet are that’s where you are. Whatever you do, whatever you say yeah I know it’s all right.
But sometimes in sport any kind of plan is a good plan. The feeling is the thing. Even watching England warm up at Edgbaston, the bucket hats, the keeps ups, the fiercely bonded stag-do vibes, there was a sense above all of something that will fall and rise together.
It helps to carry a little brilliance with you too. In many ways Root is in the most interesting position of all here. Bazball is a reaction, a way of saying: what you once were, we are not. It defines itself against the past, and against the last guy. Root actually was the last guy.
He came out here at 12.24pm, with England 92 for two, with a Test average over 50, with the day drowning in flawless June sun, with England reeling under the weight of their own manifesto, and from there produced a genuinely wonderful hundred.
He was helped early on by the field. Joe Root was born running the ball down through gully for one. Here Australia eased him into the day, opened that channel, let him tick along for a while, 14 of his first 22 runs flicks down behind square.
After which, Root basically did everything. There were drives and clips and uppercuts. This was basically a masterpiece, up and down through the gears, all hard, clean lines and moments of entirely natural improvisation.
Root got to 50 off 74 balls to his hundred off 145 as the sun began to dip a little above the floodlights, and just before England’s declaration (er, what?) at 393 for 8. He has more than 1,200 runs now in the Stokes era, at an average of 70, with five hundreds. This is an all time talent, blooming again just as Test cricket reaches its own watershed moment.
For all the strange, jittery psychic energy of England’s cricket, the warmth, the man-feelings, Root’s post-captaincy bloom has been one of its simpler, happier storylines.
