Rehearsing the possible
How movement and ritual train the imagination for uncertain futures
Also published on my Substack, Wombat Safari (6 Jan 2026)
This summer, after maybe a decade away, I found myself drawn back into watching Test-match cricket. In Australia, the intensity, inevitable controversy, and rivalry of the Ashes series consistently draw large crowds and television audiences, and the 2025/26 series is no exception.
I don’t really know why I disengaged from watching the game. I have always loved the narrative that unfolds over five days of play, the individual battle between ball and bat, the moments of brilliance that can punctuate what seems routine play, and the traditions and history of the game.
The controversy surrounding this Ashes series has centred on the ‘death of Bazball’, a confused playing philosophy promoted by the England coach (Brendan McCullum) and Captain (Ben Stokes) as a mindset and style of play that prioritises ‘positive’ cricket to push the game towards more decisive results.
In practice, it has manifested as one-dimensional aggression in batting when the game required patience and defence. There is an underlying arrogance to the approach, and the results have been mixed at best and, in this Ashes series, disastrous for England.
In a broader sense, Bazball was reimagining how Test cricket has traditionally been played. The philosophy was translated into playing practices, such as aggressive batting and bowling and risky declarations, all of which were driven by what was conceptualised as positive decision-making.
As I watched a clearly talented English team throw away games in this series they should have won, I wondered how much of sport is the rehearsal of imagination, and how closely that is reflected in what is known in psychology and philosophy as ‘embodied imagination’. Is Bazball failing because it was a shallow or incomplete imagining of Test cricket?
Acts of imagination
In October 1998, Australian cricket captain Mark Taylor reached 334 not out against Pakistan in Peshawar. One more run would have eclipsed Don Bradman’s highest score. Instead, he declared the innings closed, preserving parity with Bradman and prioritising his team over personal triumph.
Taylor’s decision baffled some but revealed cricket’s deeper ethic. Test cricket is a game rehearsed in patience, tradition, and restraint, where possibility lies as much in what is withheld as in what is achieved.
Reaching 334 requires personal discipline honed over decades; stopping there requires another kind of imaginative rehearsal—the capacity to endure, to respect, and to imagine the game as larger than oneself, placing the team before the individual and acknowledging that you, the team, and the moment are part of the game’s rich history.
Bazball’s imaginative rehearsal favours the individual over the team, the moment over the narrative, and treats the present as independent of the past.
Half a century earlier, in another corner of the world and from a different perspective, Virginia Woolf wrote about wandering the wintry streets of London in search of a pencil. Her observations as she walked the streets reveal another form of imaginative rehearsal: glimpsing strangers in doorways, overhearing fragments of conversation, watching life unfold in shopfront reflections. Her walk was a rehearsal of imaginative perception—ways of testing out other lives, other ways of seeing, futures not yet lived.
Woolf’s wanderings highlight the importance of observation and emotion to imagination, which is best understood as a form of action or doing, responding to the body’s placement and the environment. Imagination was more than passive contemplation.
Bazball’s rejection of context in decision-making overlooks that attitudes, emotions, and movements shift with context. It does not account for the shifting circumstances among the opposition, the crowd, the umpires, or the game. Instead, it imposes ‘positivity’ on the environment regardless of the circumstances. In doing so, it situates the England cricket team outside the game, and the coach and players seem surprised when their mindset and movement are out of step with the game. They also seem astonished when former players argue that adaptability to the game’s context is central to success.
Together, Taylor’s innings and Woolf’s walks point to a larger truth: imagination is not only in the mind. It is something we practise with our bodies—through patience and improvisation, ritual and repetition, step by step, ball by ball. For Bazball to succeed, it needs to be more than a positive mindset.
Imagination lives in the body
Imagination is never abstract; it is embodied. A hockey striker does not simply dream of scoring; she rehearses it endlessly in training, running the same patterns, finishing in different ways, and imagining defenders closing in. A cricket batter does not just picture a cover drive; he plays it hundreds of times in the nets until body and bat move together. On the field, batters constantly shadow-bat, imagining playing a shot differently or how a different shot could be played to the same ball.
Philosophers remind us of this same truth. Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote that the body is our ‘general medium for having a world’. Jean-Paul Sartre held that imagination was fundamentally embodied in bodily movements and emotions. He saw imagining as a form of action or doing, responding to the body’s attitudes and the environment rather than as passive contemplation. In practice, Wordsworth composed poetry while walking in England’s Lake District. Nietzsche declared that ‘only thoughts reached by walking have value’.
Our everyday lives teach the same lesson. We pace before a presentation, stand taller before a job interview, and walk to untangle a knot of worry. These are not trivial gestures; they are part of our rehearsals of possibility, ways our minds and bodies align to signal which futures we desire or find reachable.
Hockey: rehearsing improvisation
Hockey is a game of immediacy. It is sixty minutes of ceaseless motion, where the unexpected is constant. The training ground is not about scripting the match in advance but about rehearsing improvisation.
Coaches simulate conditions—such as being a goal down with five minutes left—so players rehearse responses before the real moment arrives. They drill set-piece short corners, pressing patterns, and penalty routines. Yet the aim is not rigidity. It is flexibility. Rehearsing gives the body a repertoire to draw on when chaos ensues in the circle.
The penalty shootout shows this vividly. One attacker stands on the 23-metre line, facing the goalkeeper. The attacker has practised ball control at speed, improvising movement and goal-scoring angles until they are second nature. Goalkeepers rehearse reading body language, focusing attention, and responding instinctively. Yet when the attacker begins, no rehearsal can remove uncertainty. What matters is the player’s readiness to adapt in the decisive instant, along with imagination, perception, emotion, and the body’s instinctive reaction to the moment.
Hockey, then, symbolises a rehearsal of improvisation: leaning into futures that will always be unpredictable and cultivating readiness for the unknown.
Cricket: rehearsing focus and endurance
If hockey is about speed, cricket is about time. A Test match lasts five days, demanding patience from players and spectators alike. Here, imagination is rehearsed not in frantic improvisation but in focus and endurance.
Mark Taylor’s record-equalling triple century embodies this ethic. His 334 not out was the result of patience and restraint rehearsed over the long span of his career. Cricket trains players to imagine the future slowly, ball by ball, session by session. It asks them to rehearse persistence as much as brilliance.
In the nets, bowlers probe weaknesses, delivery by delivery. Batters rehearse survival amid uncertainty. Rituals of cricket—the guard tapped at the crease, the huddle before the first ball, even the reconnection at drinks and tea breaks—are not trivial. They are rehearsals of endurance, ways to steady the body and mind for time’s uncertainty.
Cricket, then, symbolises a rehearsal of hope as resilience: the capacity to endure and to keep imagining otherwise when outcomes lie far beyond immediate reach.
Ritual as collective imaginative rehearsal
Both hockey and cricket are thick with ritual. Teams walk out to anthems and under flags. Captains exchange handshakes. Players gather in huddles before the first over or the toss. These are not theatrics. They are shared rehearsals of unity, identity, and resolve.
Ritual creates reality in advance. The Haka of New Zealand’s All Blacks—though from rugby—shows this vividly. It is not only a performance for spectators but a collective rehearsal of spirit and defiance. It makes solidarity bodily before it is tested in play.
The same principle extends beyond sport. Civil rights marches, climate strikes, pride parades—people move together as if justice and dignity already exist. Anthropologist Victor Turner called rituals ‘liminal’ acts: thresholds between what is and what might be. Rebecca Solnit describes protest as ‘acting as if’ change is possible. In each case, ritual is a rehearsal as a strategy.
Embodied imagination as an everyday practice
If hockey and cricket are rehearsals of improvisation and endurance, walking is a rehearsal of perception. Woolf’s London walks remind us that imagination is not always about scoring or surviving but about seeing otherwise. To drift without a fixed destination is to open ourselves to fragments of conversation, glimpses into strangers’ lives, and unexpected turns. Walking is an imaginative rehearsal not of outcome but of openness.
Every day, we all rehearse futures, often without noticing. Parents pacing with a newborn rehearse patience. Friends strolling together rehearse intimacy. Commuters taking a detour rehearse openness to surprise. Our imagination expands when enacted through ordinary movements, so the possible is rehearsed step by step.
The discipline of repetition
What unites hockey, cricket, and ritual is repetition. We practised the ability to keep rehearsing the possible, even when the outcome is uncertain.
Athletes embody this every day. Hockey players repeat drills not to eliminate chance but to be ready when it arrives. Cricketers spend hours in the nets rehearsing patience in decision-making. Firefighters run drills, and schoolchildren practise safety routines, preparing for futures that may never arrive but might.
Repetition is not about perfection. It is about resilience. It teaches us to act when imagination meets reality.
Two games, two futures
Hockey and cricket provide symbolic poles for rehearsal. Hockey rehearses improvisation: the capacity to move boldly when the future breaks open into chaos. Cricket rehearses endurance: the patience to live through long periods of uncertainty until possibility slowly emerges.
Together, they remind us that imagination is a muscle trained through movement. Woolf’s walks show that the same principle applies to everyday life: futures are rehearsed not only in stadiums but also on pavements, in rituals, and in small daily gestures.
The rehearsal is the revolution
We do not become new all at once. We become new by trying on the future, by enacting it in small, imperfect steps. Sport teaches this vividly. Hockey players rehearse until improvisation becomes instinct. Cricketers rehearse until patience becomes resilience. Rituals rehearse solidarity until it feels natural. Walking rehearses perception until it expands into possibility.
Imagination is a muscle. Rehearsal is how we train it. And movement—whether on the pitch, at the crease, in the Haka, in Woolf’s London streets, or in the solidarity of a march—is the stage where the future can be practised into being.
The England cricket team’s Bazball will not be consistently successful until it moves beyond a positivity mindset and towards imaginative rehearsal that recognises the importance of context, adaptability in outlook and emotion, others’ perspectives, and embedded rituals. Until then, it will remain a performative cricketing fad.
