Is it possible to watch sport in a neutral way? It should be, especially if you don’t have a dog in the fight, but watching England and Australia compete for the Ashes, it became clear to me that spectators need to pick a side.

As a cricket-mad boy, my instinct was to support the West Indies when India wasn’t playing. When the West Indians declined, I adopted Sri Lanka as my proxy team. The Sri Lankans were dashers like Sobers & Co, they produced characters like Murali, Jayasuriya and Aravinda de Silva while Ranatunga stood alone in the annals of cricketing captaincy, a canny Napoleon. Who can forget him wagging his finger at the poor Australian umpire who had no-balled Murali for throwing? When Arjuna Ranatunga stuck it to the Australians, cricket’s Third World audiences thrummed in unison, like tines on a tuning fork.

The Ashes meant nothing to me. They happened in remote places between two unlovable teams, Australia’s tiresomely hard men and England’s whingers. When it’s Predator versus Alien, it’s hard to care. Also, for the longest time, these contests happened off-stage: you couldn’t watch the Ashes Tests live. Consequently, non-partisan indifference was possible.

Not so, I found, while watching the Ashes live, on television. Test cricket is a long game and basic to its enjoyment is waking up to the prospect of play every day over five days, buoyed up by the hope that your team will do well. If you aren’t invested in a team, that sense of anticipation, the connective tissue of a Test match, isn’t available to you. It’s still possible to enjoy a Test as a series of individual performances — Root’s magical hundred in the Edgbaston Test or Khawaja’s epic, anchoring innings — or individual match-ups, like the contest between David Warner and Stuart Broad, but that’s more like sampling cameos than drowning in the long game.

Steve Smith, the greatest batter since Bradman, famously doesn’t sleep through the five days of a Test because his mind is restlessly reliving what’s past and anticipating what is to come. Watching a Test is a pale echo of Smith’s condition, and this engagement can only be sustained if you pick a side. Isn’t there a pathos to this non-playing mimicry of the real immersion experienced by the athletes who play the game? Yes, of course, there is. All vicarious pleasure-seeking is pathetic; that’s just the nature of spectatorship.

There is another, more Olympian, view of spectatorship where the watcher is a rational connoisseur whose pleasure in the game doesn’t need the toxic diesel of partisanship but feeds off the green hydrogen of analytical understanding. On this view, the informed spectator is one who understands that a Test match is not a family drama complete with villains and heroes but a game of percentages, of risk and reward, where performance depends not just on ability or momentum or intent but often on random chance, or luck.

There is much to commend this Spockian view of cricket not least because it backs up its hypotheses about the game with data but it conflicts with ordinary spectatorship in one serious way. To be a spectator is to be in the moment whereas the data-driven analyst sees the game as a matter of first principles that are tested in the long term, the longue durée. A historical demographer is interested in population changes in human societies over long passages of time, not the reproductive adventures of a playboy. Someone who is interested in the latter, is better off reading a tabloid than consulting a demographer.

One reason why I was tempted to root for England was the challenge Bazball posed to conventional cricketing rationality. Pat Cummins’ Australians are, on the face of it, the better side. They have younger, faster bowlers, a great off-spinner, an excellent wicket-keeper batsman, a hugely gifted all-rounder and in Usman Khawaja, Marnus Labuschagne and Steve Smith, the best top order batsmen in the world. The English, in contrast, have two great seam bowlers at the end of their careers, an accurate, if politically incorrect, medium pace bowler, an inspirational all-rounder captain whose knees are gone, and a wicket-keeper batsman who is a lot better in front of the stumps than behind them.

But despite these infirmities, England have had a spectacular year, thanks seemingly to their ideological commitment to attacking play. Named after England’s coach, Brendon ‘Baz’ McCullum, himself a legendarily attacking batsman, Bazball has been embraced by England’s skipper, Ben Stokes, and his band of men with the zeal of converts. And they have made it work for them. Before the Ashes began, England had played 12 Tests and won 10 of them in great attacking style. One of Bazball’s victims was the Indian team, playing the deferred fifth Test of the 2021 series, having conceded a huge first-innings lead. Root and Bairstow pulverised a full strength Indian bowling attack that included Jasprit Bumrah to win by seven wickets.

Could Stokes’ Englishmen keep this up against Australia, the best Test team in the world, one that had comprehensively beaten the erstwhile best Test team in the world, India, in the World Test Championship final? If they could, Bazball would be elevated from a style of play to a cricketing revolution. If their kamikaze batsmen, their bizarrely attacking field placing, and even stranger declarations, could beat not just the best team in the world but the cricketing odds, it might make sense to opportunistically root for England.

But after that astonishing first innings display on the opening day of the Edgbaston Test when England’s batsmen blazed their way to nearly four hundred runs in less than a day’s play and declared, I took stock and threw in my lot with Australia. I did it for two related reasons. One, if England won, we would never be allowed to forget it. England don’t win at sport that often, so when they do, they never stop talking about it. The English football team winning the World Cup at home, Virginia Wade winning Wimbledon in the Jubilee year, Murray winning the men’s title, the first Brit to have won it since before the Second World War… nobody’s been allowed to forget these triumphs. If they won the Ashes with a revolutionary new method, they would be insufferable.

But there was a second, more important, reason for backing Australia.My generation loved the West Indiesfor an attacking flair that made otherteams seem pallid and careworn.The success of Bazball threatenedto make England the inheritor of calypso cricket, as if the flame had passed after an interval, from Sobersto Stokes. That was a prospect too awful to be borne. And so, to guard my memories, I decided to root for the Australians. It’s gone well so far. In Khawaja, I have a South Asian claim on this team. And cheering SteveSmith on, as he jerked and twitched his way to a century, the greatest Undead batter ever to play the game, was a real pleasure. Aussie Aussie Aussie, Oi Oi Oi

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