Success, spectacle and scrutiny: Media construction of Bazball in contemporary test cricket

England’s Test cricket has changed dramatically since Brendon McCullum took over in June 2022. The team adopted a new identity, Bazball, with aggressive intent, and rebuilt its batting order. This article explores the journey of the Bazball ideology from 2022 to 2026 within the English media. The longitudinal study uses Entman’s model to trace the evolution of narratives in the Daily Mail, The Times and The Independent in the United Kingdom. The study’s findings reveal a complete narrative life cycle. Initially, Bazball was characterized by hype as a revolutionary fix for problems in English cricket. In contrast, the later period of Bazball saw it referenced in the ultimate defeat of English cricket. The narrative was then reframed with Bazball as the problem itself: a vacuous cult of amateurism. The study put forward the narrative life cycle model (NLM), which highlights key mechanisms of frame resilience, including discursive elasticity and the decisive role of ‘sacred defeats’ in activating dormant, rival cultural scripts. The study concludes that sports media narratives are not passive reports but active, strategic contestations of meaning, in which pre-existing national stories compete for dominance, arbitrated but not wholly determined by on-field results.