England’s Existential Cricket is not fun and carefree but therapy for years of cruelty

This week I watched, in covert late night instalments, the entire day-by-day extended highlights of England’s 1994 five-Test tour of the West Indies. This wasn’t meant to happen. But as Rick James famously said, Sky Cricket Greats is a hell of a drug. In the event it just turned out to be one of those strangely moreish spectacles.

A lot of things happened very slowly and then happened suddenly with dramatic jumps forward. Mike Atherton top-scored across the series but still seemed to be continually walking off looking soulful and wronged, sawn off by another grubber. Alex Stewart swished and carved his way to those two brilliant, breezy hundreds in Barbados, hunched in his agreeably old-fashioned stance, sleeves rolled like a cricketer from a 1950s cigarette card. Andy Caddick seemed to be always bowling, from both ends and for both teams.

Related: ‘Embrace it’: Stokes says Test cricket must become more exciting to survive

But what really stood out was the unrelenting harshness of the whole thing, the sense, entirely unquestioned at the time, of cricket as a form of sporting punishment, a spectacle shot through with pain and transgression, a theatre of human failure. Here is Angus Fraser striding to the wicket with an air of doom-laden momentum, the run-up of a man building up speed to throw himself off a cliff. Here is the flu-ridden Mark Ramprakash looking stricken in the stands, the camera lingering gleefully on this tableau of barely hidden pain.

Cut in half by by a vicious skidding thing from Curtly Ambrose, John Crawley just looks utterly drained, consumed by sadness, a man who really just needs to spend six months alone with his labrador learning to love again. “Another failure for Crawley,” says a crowing voice.

At one point Caddick bowls an over that goes for 19 and the commentators are still fuming on about it two Tests later. Eventually they literally create a slow motion split-screen of Caddick and Fraser bowling just so the commentators can accuse Caddick of being a rabbit hearted powderpuff, of not “bowling with conviction” (he also took five wickets in the first innings, but hey).

The point being, this was just the standard. This has been the deep, authentic voice of English Test cricket, the founding spirit of this deeply mannered and hierarchical sport. Failure must always be equated with moral cowardice, a failure above all of conformity and character, which are the same thing.

Watching this, a week out from an Ashes series that will be defined by England’s attempts to play with a different attitude, to invent on the hoof a kind of cricket without fear or ancestral shame, there was (I think) a moment of revelation about the nature of the thing we have been calling Bazball. Perhaps the best way to understand it is as an attempt to reject the basic, founding cruelty of the sport.

Because while cricket is beauty and grace and drama, it is also cruelty. This thing is a well of pain, punitive, mannered, unforgiving in its rituals, its selections, its hierarchies, its etiquette. Zoom out and cricket as a sport, as the English colonial game, has that impulse of control, repression, punishment woven into its basic foundation, the ideal of 11 stiff hair-oiled men holding back chaos on some foreign field; the fear that some part of the world will collapse into disorder if an Englishman is unable to suffer quietly in a set of flannelled whites. Remember when Kevin Pietersen got out playing a sweep in the first Ashes Test in 2009? We almost built him a wicker man.

This might sound like the kind of cod-analysis sports writers are so fond of but it is also something that the players have been quite open about ever since the great mood shift last year. Only this week Ben Stokes wrote one of those Players Tribune pieces in which he starts by saying “Can we stop using the phrase: ‘That’s a bad shot’?”, an attack on pretty much everything cricket has ever been, and a conversation he might like to have with the day-to-day highlights crew on the 1994 West Indies tour, where this – bad shot, bad ball – is pretty much all anyone cares about.

Stokes gives a kind of manifesto for how to play this way. “We’re going to play without fear” is the nub of it. Step back and it seems startling he even has to say this. Why is fear still such a thing? The answer, of course, is that this has been a game defined by fear, control, hierarchy, right down to its basic vocab of straight bats, top orders, “chinamen”. And this must be a pretty weird place to have spent your entire waking life from the age of nine, in effect to have been professional cricketers longer than any previous generation, with no air, no life outside the blue lycra machine.

And once you realise this it explains quite a lot. England’s Existential Cricket (previously Bazball) has been thrillingly successful. But it has also been angry, shot through with a kind of vengeance, the 60 ball rage-hundred, the friction – can you feel it? – with the older voices in the media and punditry box. This isn’t light and fun and carefree. It is a kind of catharsis, Bazball as therapy.

Various things start to make sense in this light, from the obvious gamble of picking Moeen Ali, whose Test career ended in unhappiness, drained by the system, the bubble, the cruelty. The narrative here is healing, putting right. So pick Moeen. Fix it.

Related: Jason Roy’s Stateside jaunt the inevitable endgame for cricket as we know it | Barney Ronay

The continued selection of Zak Crawley kind of makes sense once you understand that this entire regime is about rejecting the idea of the disposable player, that Crawley is in effect a symbol, the regimental goose, his flakiness worn as a badge of pride, a standard to be carried into battle. We will keep picking him when he fails. Because this means we are not like you.

Two questions remain. How will this play out across five Tests? There is an element of misdirection in the focus on batting in the new style. In reality this has worked in large part because James Anderson has taken 45 wickets at 17.5 in the last year and Ollie Robinson 27 at 22, helped by some fine captaincy. Bowlers tend to be key when England do well in England.

Beyond that, is there any kind of long-term model here? Stokes has talked about reenergising Test cricket, although this is probably something he should take up with his franchise or his cement manufacturer. In many ways England’s Existential Cricket feels like the end of something, a place where the inmates have taken over the prison camp and are having one last party in the towers before we all die of tuberculosis. As ever with cricket, none of this is happening in a vacuum. Even Bazball speaks to the same deeper issues with exclusion, with bars to entry, with rigidity and class. For now, why not just keep on burning it all down right to the end.