By the very end, Trent Bridge was practically empty. This felt bleakly appropriate. If the age of Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum lived by re-engaging a sceptical public, winning big series, doing the unprecedented and elevating Test cricket above its three-an-over purgatory, then this was exactly how it had to die: the first England team in history to lose a home three-match series after being 1-0 up. The run rate on that final day? Exactly three runs an over.

But then if we have learned anything from Stokes and McCullum over the last few years, it is that details – like preparing for an Ashes tour – are for losers and weak men. Is demoting Emilio Gay to No 6 in his third game really the best way of saving a Test? Was there a way for Harry Brook to face more than nine balls in England’s second innings? Can we really expect a Brook side – Hazball – to behave any differently? But these questions do not concern the England management, and so by extension they should not concern you either.

“What are they doing?” the New Zealand players chuckled on the fourth evening as yet another England batter lobbed a catch into the leg side. The answer, as ever, is that they were creating content: influencer cricket, viral cricket, cricket perfectly calibrated to game the algorithm.

And who cares if you toss away a home series, seven out of nine Tests and a captain in the process? Perhaps, on reflection, the real Bazball was the likes we harvested along the way.

If this sounds glib, then we are simply engaging with Bazball on its own terms: a nihilistic cult that for all its spectacular successes meant nothing and stood for nothing. And was thus a perfect fit for a sport in chaos, an English cricketing establishment desperate for eyeballs, an England and Wales Cricket Board with precious little cricketing experience and thus more inclined to burn things down than nurture them.

In this country we often sneer at Australia’s teary-eyed mythology of the Baggy Green or India’s militarised hyper-nationalism. But this is at least an attempt to define the why, a locus of devotion, a lineage, a story to tell. English men’s cricket (in contrast to women’s cricket, a genuine tale of resistance and triumph over indignity) has no such story. It exists purely to flog the next tranche of Test match tickets and pack the Sky schedules in the long weeks when there is no Premier League football. It exists for no other reason than to monetise the future version of itself.

Stokes was the perfect cricketer for this age of feverish salesmanship: a great player, albeit a creator of great moments rather than lasting monuments, with just enough of a rebellious streak to court danger without forgetting who ultimately paid his cheques. In a way, Stokes was a quintessentially English misconception of what a man of the people should look like, a Diego Maradona for the Steven Bartlett era. Of course his talent, endurance, ambition and competitiveness were legendary, and could have inspired England to big series wins had they been intelligently harnessed.

Instead, English cricket was more interested in commodifying Stokes’s talent than channelling it. Under the directorship of Andrew Strauss in the mid-2010s, and then again under McCullum from 2022 onwards, there was a clear culture shift away from team ethic towards individual expression. Play your shots. Fill your boots in franchise cricket. Be where the noise is. Party hard. A 2019 ECB strategy document stated that the job of the England team was to “create heroes”, noting that young fans were often more inspired by individual athletes than the team they played for.

This was the permissive environment that generated some of Stokes’s greatest moments on a cricket field (Cape Town 2016, Headingley 2019, Lord’s 2023, Old Trafford 2025), some of his most humiliating moments off it (Mbargo 2017, Perth 2025, Rex Rooms 2026) and no series win against Australia or India since 2018. Ultimately the genius and the idiocy sprang from the same well: a culture that essentially gave him the licence to do what he wanted as long as he carried on paying the bills. Doubtless it is a talent that he will continue to cultivate in retirement: the book, the podcast, the lucrative after-dinner circuit.

Perhaps the reason his departure left such a sour taste was that it managed to capture in a single moment everything people dislike about this team: the self-absorption, the naked individualism, the inattention to detail, a basic disdain for the match situation, his inexperienced teammates, the opposition. Stokes often liked to talk about saving Test cricket, an ambition that never really seemed to extend beyond the Big Three, and which should now be put in the context of imprinting his main character energy all over one of New Zealand’s greatest ever away triumphs. Even his go-slow at the last Ashes felt like a kind of impulsive petulance, a tactic in want of a strategy, like a dad who switches the family holiday from Kefalos to Lapland at the last minute, and then rails at the kids for not packing their thermals.

There will be those who see in his abrupt departure an act of principled conscience against the ECB suits. In reality, it was simply the crowning act of a career that always offered gratification in the guise of altruism. And in a wider sense the anger out there mirrors the way we feel about our politicians: promises that never stacked up to reality, instinct as a substitute for intellect, gimmicks dressed up as meaningful change. The hostility to scrutiny or introspection, the pure arrogance of a governing class that wants your vote but doesn’t really care either way, because they control the levers of power and you don’t.

And so really this was the only way it could conceivably end: in chaos and waste and self-interest, a charade that merely exposes the wider absurdity of a nation of 62 million people that can produce maybe nine adequate Test cricketers. There may have been others, of course. Dan Lawrence, Sam Cook, Haseeb Hameed, Ben Foakes, Matthew Potts, Liam Dawson, to name but a few. Liam Livingstone wasn’t called back because phone calls are woke, or something.

Which again is entirely in keeping with an organisation far more comfortable disrupting things than building them up. Let’s consider some of the collateral damage English cricket has generated over the past two decades: the terrestrial television audience, state school cricket, the smaller counties, people who can no longer afford England tickets, an entire generation of players who were told they were a useless anachronism with no chance of making it for England. The Blast, detonated to make space for The Hundred, which has now been sold off, along with most of August.

And once more, a new era is coming. Most probably it will be Brook, a man with no discernible leadership skills who bats like he left the oven on, but does generate excellent content. Perhaps we may even be treated to a display of performative humility, a fleeting attempt to reconnect with the public ahead of next year’s ticket deadline. As ever, we eagerly await the next chapter. Equally, there comes a point when you run out of things to burn down.