annashay 
The match ended in two days. Two days. What should have been a five-day odyssey, a slow-burning masterpiece of tension, courage, and human drama, collapsed before it began. I was left with grief, disbelief, and an unspent ritual, a void that demanded attention.
I turned to writing as therapy. And thus, days three and four of the intended Test match between Australia and England became research and reflection, a way to wrest meaning from this disappointment. I spoke to friends from Karachi to Oxford, some who had travelled to Perth, all as desperate as I was to make sense of this reality. I spoke to friends in Silicon Valley, untouched by the pains of cricket, yet intimately familiar with the bruises of the design process.
By the time what would have been day five arrived, the fantasy finish that never was, I had poured every ounce of grief and disbelief, with small sparks of hope, into my writing. Rarely have I managed to channel frustration into something meaningful. Perhaps never.
And if this piece has any clarity at all, it is because of my wife, who endured my moping, my long disappearances into this private vortex, and then sifted through every version and carved every sentence until it caught the light. Any polish this piece possesses is hers.
This is my offering: a tribute to the ritual denied, the lessons hidden in sudden failure, and to all those who helped me navigate the hara-kiri at Perth.
The unraveling
It was the hour of 18:20 when my Friday truly began. My body had been awake since morning, but my spirit obeys only the slow-moving sun of Test cricket. Wherever in the world a real Test match unfolds, my internal clock bends to its rhythm, and so at 18:20, when most of Palo Alto was winding down, I was only just coming alive.
I hijacked my nephew’s evening first; a grad student, earnest enough to humour an uncle possessed by cricket madness, he followed me into the dining hall where, without warning or apology, we converted Stanford’s quiet civility into a Karachi sports bar. It was absurd, it was brilliant, and it was ours.
We slipped into memory as easily as one slips into a stance: that cramped Princeton basement, 12-year-old him hurling tennis balls at 28-year-old me, both of us convinced that perfection was a moral duty. Mitchell Starc had been our shared north star then, the left-arm action he tried to imitate, the blueprint of a dream he never quite abandoned. And now, years later, here we were, two adults with allegedly serious lives, cheering and wincing in equal measure at every delivery by Starc.
By 20:20, the first session closed. England dominant. Calm restored. A brief, golden intermission where life felt almost gracious. We now inducted his wife, a Stegner fellow and brilliant poet, into our improvised support group. She brewed the Darjeeling and infused an intellectual flair into our conversation. Only Test cricket grants such liberties: infinite reflection, five days to think, to ache, to witness a story unfolding at the speed of truth.
And then, 55 minutes later, Steve Smith took that catch. Something in me snapped clean; they needed to be 150 runs ahead before this loss, and I informed my support group that the unravelling had begun.
England, presented with a timid Australian attack, chose wrong over wrong with mechanical consistency. I shifted screens, changed geographies, searched for refuge in another universe: the South Africa-India Test. Stubbs dancing down at Kuldeep, surviving Bumrah … it should have been enough to salvage the evening. But the ache of watching Stokes fail swallowed everything.
And then Travis Head walked in.
“Cricket requires one to assume such indecent postures.” Clearly, Oscar Wilde is watching this with me, because there it was: indecency in motion. Head’s batting, a triumph of utility over grace, is an affront to beauty itself. No flourish, no poetry, no seduction. Just pure, unfiltered productivity. Shot after shot landing like administrative memos. Efficient. Necessary.
I knew I was projecting my grief, unfairly stapled to this man. Yet I stared, transfixed. Travis Head turned elegance into currency, verse into invoice, and I watched him like a willing masochist, fully complicit in my own suffering.
I do not seek pain. I am not self-sabotaging. Yet there I was, forced to live the very doctrine I preach to founders and leaders: great design emerges only through messy, painful prototyping. I leaned on David Kelley and Bill Burnett, my design thinking mentors, who insist that prototypes burn … they must burn. I stitch their wisdom to the lessons imparted by my cricketing ustaads, and the chaos on the screen gained a strange clarity. The unravelling. The absurdity. The sharp sting of disappointment. It hurt. It challenged. It taught.
Perth was not a terminal failure. It was a prototype burning to reveal the questions I had refused to ask.
And this, ultimately, is why I write. Not to teach. Not to instruct. But to survive the blow. To process. To remind myself that walking the talk is brutal, human, and strangely beautiful. Perth is not the end. It is a question that surfaced, a prototype sacrificed so something wiser, braver, and more honest might emerge. And that truth is harder to swallow when the prototype happens to be the only inspiring idea left in modern cricket.
For the last 18 months, Ben Stokes has been attempting something that most sporting leaders never dare to attempt. He has been trying to build a long-format masterpiece inside a short-format world. He is attempting, sometimes very imperfectly, to redesign Test cricket itself. This is why this two-day Test match hurts. This is why the loss feels tragic. And this is why it also feels important.
Because what Stokes is doing is not entertainment. It is designed. And design, as we teach it, is brutal. It demands failure early, failure publicly, failure in ways that look embarrassing before they look beautiful. His defeat matters because the experiment matters. And the experiment matters because Test cricket’s future now depends on the success of a handful of dreamers who still believe that this sport can be a cathedral, not a casino. Stokes is one of them. Maybe the last of them. And Perth was his first real heartbreak.
A 5-day match is a 5-day examination of the human condition
There is a reason it’s called Test cricket. It does not reward brilliance in flashes. It demands the slow burn of genius. It asks for stamina of mind, appetite for suffering, and a near-spiritual commitment to craft. It is the opposite of modern life. It is the opposite of instant reward.
A Test match gives you time to dream, time to recover, time to fight back, time to win ugly, time to unravel, time to reinvent yourself within the same contest. It is a sport designed to examine temperament and talent in the same breath.
And this is where England faltered on day two in Perth. Their aggression, thrilling on day one, suddenly looked cavalier. What had appeared inspired began to look impatient. Their strokes lacked the humility required by a harsh pitch. Their bowlers tried too hard to force miracles. Their nerves betrayed their ideas.
In a five-day contest, this is fatal.
The first truth of Test cricket is simple: brilliance must be sustained, not performed. Grit and imagination must sit side by side. You cannot survive on genius alone. You must endure, iterate, and keep walking through fire long after your confidence has evaporated.
And that is the missing piece in Ben Stokes’s design masterclass. Not courage. Not creativity. The missing piece is longevity.
The T20 imagination crisis: How administrators turned dreamers into accountants
Let us be clear. The crisis of Test cricket is not about Australia or England or even about who loses or wins. The deeper crisis comes from a group of administrators who lacked imagination at the very moment the sport received the greatest financial windfall in its history.
The explosion of T20 leagues brought money, celebrity, and global attention. But instead of building Test academies, long-form coaching pipelines, or 10-year development ecosystems, cricket’s leaders chased the profits of the carnival.
They took the revenue of a golden age and spent it on more carnivals.
So what happens in countries like Pakistan, the West Indies, and Afghanistan? Countries brimming with raw genius, ferocious young fast bowlers, fearless batters, and a culture of street cricket that produces more imagination per square foot than any high-performance lab?
What happens is tragic.
The youth see only one currency: fast fame, fast money, fast leagues.
At 18, when they should be dreamers, they are told to think like accountants. Their bodies are treated like assets. Their talent is trimmed into something that fits a four-over job description. Their ambition shrinks to franchise contracts because no one around them dares to tell them that Test cricket is worth fighting for.
T20 is TikTok. Test cricket is Tarantino.
If the only filmmaking that exists is TikTok, then the next generation will never learn to appreciate narrative, complexity, tension, or depth. They will grow up believing cinema is fifteen seconds of dopamine.
That is what we are risking with cricket. A dystopia where the sport forgets its soul. And in such a world, the very few who choose the long format are not just players. They are custodians of a cultural inheritance.
Which brings us back to Stokes.
Perth as prototype: Why this failure matters and why it is not final
When Steve Jobs was designing the first iPhone, the early prototypes were disasters. Nothing worked. The screen glitched. The interface collapsed. The team doubted the idea itself. But Steve persisted because he wasn’t designing for the present. He was designing for a future only he could see.
He was designing for longevity, not applause.
This is where Stokes finds himself. He has rewired the spirit of his team. He has attracted brilliant thinkers. He has redefined the culture. He has turned Test cricket into a theatre again.
But the one skill still missing is the slow craft of sustaining genius across five days. That, unfortunately, is the one thing Test cricket does not forgive.
But failure is part of great design. In Silicon Valley, we teach it outright: fail early, fail gracefully, fail without losing your appetite for the next experiment. The prototype only breaks you if you mistake it for a finished product.
Stokes is not finished. England are not finished. They are still in the workshop. And Perth was a reminder that radical ideas need reinforcement, not retreat.
The global stakes: Why the next four Tests are not about England and Australia
This is not an Ashes story anymore. It is a Test cricket story.
The next four matches matter because children in Karachi, Kabul, and Barbados are watching. They are watching to see whether long-form courage still has a place in a world obsessed with short-form comfort. They are watching to see if there is something noble left in the sport.
The child in Karachi wants to believe that he can dream beyond franchise contracts. The child in Kabul wants to believe that his cricket can transcend politics. The child in Barbados wants to believe that the legacy of Marshall and Garner still has a future and will continue to serve as his individual identity.
Test cricket is their Tarantino film in a TikTok world. Ben Stokes is the only director still trying to make it.
And that is why this loss, painful as it is, cannot be the end.
The work ahead: Genius, longevity, and the courage to continue
Steve Jobs said it best: surround A-players with anything less and the whole system dulls.
Not long ago, an Ollie Robinson passed as perfectly acceptable to the establishment and to viewers alike; tidy average, no voltage, the patron saint of ‘good enough.’ His very acceptability said more about the era than the bowler.
Stokes has shattered that era. He has shown the world a new imagination.
Now he must add the last ingredient: the long, sustained mastery that Test cricket rewards.
He must teach his team to hold genius for five days. To absorb pressure. To win ugly. To trust their ideas through fire. To understand that innovation must coexist with attrition.
Because Test cricket is a masterpiece. And masterpieces evolve slowly.
England will rise again. Not because of desire but because of design. And because Stokes, unlike most leaders in sport, is crafting a legacy, not a season.
This defeat is not the end. It is the difficult middle of a great story. And if the story ends well, Stokes will be remembered not as a rebel captain but as the man who saved Test cricket from the poverty of short-term thinking.
The work continues. The design continues. The belief continues.
And so must we.
