Well, that was something new. Have you ever seen the one‑armed man running a bye to the keeper while 20,000 people leap and writhe and hold their heads and the one-armed man shouts in agony?
Have you ever seen figures picked out in silhouette at the top of the stand, posed in perfect shapes of triumph, dread and fear because another gobbet of time has passed, another dot, because essentially nothing has happened?
Have you ever seen the one‑armed man walk down and prod the middle of the wicket between balls, like this is just another cricket day, and had to swallow a snort of disbelief at the extreme cinematic weirdness of this snapshot in time?
At times such as these, immersed in the super-heated bubble at the final day at the Oval, all of this stuff undeniably happening but also basically nothing, a story told only to itself, you do wonder how you’d explain it to someone from Denmark.
Words such as nuance, post-colonial, will, protocol gabbled out while the person from Denmark nods politely. Wait. Geopolitics! Hunger! Umpire’s call! And all of this expressed through 25 days of the most stiffly choreographed sporting activity ever devised. This is a game that takes place in trousers. It’s a dance around a semi‑invisible dark red ball.
Two hours after the final notes at the Oval all that was left on one of the upper staircases in the stand at the Vauxhall End was a single abandoned black leather slip‑on shoe with an empty carton of snus balanced on top of it, and you thought, yeah, that seems about right. At the end of which India did definitely win here by six runs.
On a grey and smudged south London morning, the Oval felt like a mini-Glastonbury before play. All the notes were here, the hum, the crackle, the shouts, the Indian section in the stands rising to wave at Dinesh Karthik as he marched across this sallow old lime green oval like a presidential candidate.
This is a very distinct stage for urban sporting theatre. Crawl past on a 36 bus and you get to peer in over that high wall into an empty secret garden, peopled for six months of the year by a man with a broom, but tended and cherished for moments such as this when it feels like nowhere else in the world could possibly exist; and where suddenly something comes up out of the soil, echoes of other days, stored up energy, ghosts at the edge of the action.
The first of those, that first Ashes Test in 1881, was so tense it is said one spectator died of a heart attack, while another chewed through an umbrella handle as Fred “the Demon” Spofforth worked his way through England’s batsmen.
What was the modern equivalent here? Breaking your refresh button? Spontaneously combusting your own vape? Cricket, which is always dying even while it throbs with vibrant life, is always doing this to us, and always questioning itself, wondering about the end times even while it’s out there writing Ulysses again.
Here England needed 35 to win and India three and a half wickets to level the series. The players came out to a huge rolling wave of applause, India’s fielders breaking from their huddle to sprint in unison, impossibly heroic already, a group who have given us everything over the past two months.
And this was a day for Mohammed “the Demon” Siraj, who really is the most lovable maniac in sport, and who bowled like a god here to win this game.
Jamie Overton hooked the first ball for four and Surrey-cut the next one and you waited for the energy to shift. Prasidh Krishna just laughed and you loved him for it. Jamie Smith still looked stuck, frozen, drained and was duly euthanised from the crease. England tried to Baz this, to play shots, because how else? But the ball was talking too, and the ball will have its say.
Overton lasted one delivery from Siraj, who was bowling to his own stirring one-man montage soundtrack by now. Simple pieces of Test cricket, a leave, were greeted with huge cheers and gasps like Puccini being roared on by a heavy metal stadium.
Josh Tongue came and went like filler in a western who exists only to be gunned down in the final shootout. And so it came to pass, as Chris Woakes walked down the pavilion steps for his Lord Nelson moment. Kiss me, Gus.
This should not be happening. A one-armed man, sling tucked weirdly inside his woollen jumper, is trying to play elite sport. Gus Atkinson slogged a swirling six over long-on, like a man throwing the last sticks of furniture on to the fire. There was wild impromptu chatter about the tactics, the game‑state of how to rotate the one-armed man, how to farm him, all of it just noise in the dark.
Siraj was always going to close this out. Atkinson’s off-stump was flattened and the moment seemed to stretch out. There was a breath, a beat, before the chaos of victory kicked in, figures running everywhere, an unceasing well of drama, needle, blood, skill leading to the perfect symmetry of a 2-2 draw. And all the while underneath the static and the shouts something else seemed to settle, the sound of quiet applause.
Never mind the score, or the arguments over moments, luck, injury, whatever. It is simply time for hats off here. Plaudits to India for a wonderful effort. And from a home point of view, for Ben Stokes and the Bazball project.
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For all the bullshit, the moments of head-scratch, the infuriating asides, these lunatics are producing something entirely new. “Are You Not Entertained?” doesn’t really do it justice. Are you not wrung out, frazzled, wowed? It has been the most glorious experiment, moments of beauty, fun and impossible drama set always to its own insistent set of rhythms.
And who knows, we may not see this again. This may be the thing, right here. Who knows if Stokes will play another Test in England? The plan is to keep rolling on, but Australia tends to be a bookend and England’s captain has been playing at this level for 14 years.
Woakes may be done. Joe Root, surely not. Mark Wood, not sure. Jofra Archer, not sure. But what a show they have given us. What are they going to say about Bazball? Who’s going to tell them? What sense will this make when cricket has become the Ryder Cup or some colours on a screen with a shouting man from Love Island?
Even the ceremonials at the end were part of the theatre, like the final act of a Shakespeare comedy when all returns to laughter, bonds are formed, hands shaken, misunderstandings corrected. Stokes was pale and terse, deep in the Oval indoor school, but he talked first about the spectacle and the brilliance of the series.
England do like to chat about being the saviours of Tests. There is self-interest in this. It’s a very well‑paid job. But it is also love, devotion and faith. “As a massive advocate of this format … this has certainly been one of those series that can keep that narrative around Test cricket is dying … so … well,” Stokes shrugged, while also sniffing at the idea that Harry Brook had let his team down by scoring the wrong kind of 111.
Stokes made a good point about the selflessness of the remaining England seamers, putting their bodies on the line to fill the breach left by Woakes. He talked about Siraj with genuine admiration, which will, you feel, mean a lot to the man himself. He said he would now be “knocking about” the Hundred, which is a bit like Odin announcing at the end of the Asgard‑Jotunheim War that he fancies a game of Bop-It now.
And so we must talk about the past and future, both of which do still have to exist outside the moment. Bazball can be maddening, cult-like, just another clique. England have talked mind‑bending rubbish at times. There have been shoulders picks, good-around-the-group picks. Any divvying up of this result should dwell on the selection of two players who just haven’t had any cricket, most obviously Jacob Bethell, who was shunted into the light and produced a tortured innings, a man out there batting with a stale baguette.
The Baz-era has been maddening to every person from every other country who has ever heard a self-assured Englishman explaining the world to them while simultaneously conveying that, yeah, you’re doing really well, but we do still own this. The super cool optics, the iconography of lounging exceptionalism. It has been very funny at times.
But this thing has also produced utterly thrilling cricket, sport that is simply unlike the stuff that went before. It has been postmodernism at times, taking these structures and relics and trying to do something new. What is batting? What is a game for? What is a nightwatchman? Test cricket is always an interplay of rules, shapes, tradition and the slightly tortured individuals at its centre. This has been pure personality, those old rules and protocols bent into a framework for self‑expression.
It also gave us this final day, because England kept playing the same way to the end rather than falling into respectable defeat, a strange blend of colour, will, drama, art, maths, salt, sweet, sour, bitter, umami; and a reminder that this sport will always leave you both stuffed to the gills and deliciously unsatisfied.
At close of play it no longer felt like a chilly November morning. It felt like February. It isn’t overly dramatic to say this might yet be the high point of all this. We will now need to talk about team building and the future. England do look well set for the Ashes, if the bowling can settle down and bodies heal. For now it is probably best just to be glad we got to see it.
