It’s been one of the strangest cricket series on record.  Hurried, frenetic, foolish, haphazard and, at points, unbecomingly immature.  The cricket between England and Australia in this, the 2025-6 Ashes series, was a recreational coke line, a narcotics fix, a dopamine thrill.  But was it even cricket?  One thinks of those deathless lines from the French general Pierre Bosquet responding to the British light cavalry attack on Russian artillery during the Crimean War in October 1854: “C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre: c’est de la folie” (It is magnificent, but it is not war: it is madness).  Position this same Frenchman in Gallic severity at the Melbourne Cricket Ground during the Boxing Day Test match between the oldest rivals of the game and we might well have something similarly stated: “Magnificent, but was it cricket?  It was certainly mad.” 

This series has seen some of the earliest conclusions of Test matches in recent memory.  (Two matches were extinguished in two days.)  Much attention has been paid to that gaudy, streakily packaged confection called Bazball, the creation of the English coach and former New Zealand cricketer Brendon McCullum.  It might have simply been called cricket of the entertaining, playful variety: rapid, giddy scoring, above all entertaining; scintillating, sharp bowling and smaller totals to chase.  But it was far more than that.  It suggested a relaxed disposition to the dusty protocols of tradition: fewer training sessions; fewer warmup matches; and more golf and activities unrelated to the essentials of the game.

We live in an age of increasingly shorter........

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