The news got so absurd I watched only the cricket. Especially when it said the American peace plan for Ukraine was likely written by Russia. The Dmitriev-Witkoff proposal had fast become the “DimWit Plan.”

That’s when sport is at its best. I thought this watching the Ashes in Australia against England, though feeling discomfort at enjoying a slow, rule-bound sport while following a lawless, lethal war. The mental endurance may look the same on paper, but exists miles apart morally.

The Ashes are governed by a playbook thicker than a cricket bat. Ukraine’s reality is defined by rule-breaking—treaties torn up, borders violated, norms smashed. Ashes cricket is an escape from lawlessness. In Tests, you lose one match and look to the next. In war, each “session” changes the map or ends someone’s life.

The Ashes trophy is a tiny urn. A 19th-century keepsake. About the size of a perfume bottle, it supposedly contains the “ashes” of a burnt wooden bail. Teams don’t even get to take it home. They just get a replica. Both pretend the urn is theirs, even if no one actually owns it, as the real one sits in the museum at Lord’s, cricket’s headquarters in North London. Australia “wins” it but can’t touch it. England “loses” it, but still physically possesses it.

If cricket is a space in which nations project aggression only symbolically, it still uses the language of conflict (battles, barrages, attacks, collapses). It plays within boundaries. War, on the other hand, begins where boundaries collapse.

Meanwhile, as Europe still grits its teeth over the would-be peace plan, I am trying to concentrate. As 19th-century mathematician G. H. Hardy said: “If I knew I was going to die today, I think I should still want to hear the cricket scores.” Kim Philby was the same. Nicholas Elliot, his former pal, said he just wanted to follow cricket after slinking off to Moscow.

To think the Ashes started with a joke obituary. After England lost in 1882, The Sporting Times published a mock obit saying English cricket had died and “the body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia.”

The Royal Navy intercepts two more Russian warships off the UK coast, protecting a nation with only a few watching the cricket through the night, or listening to it on Test Match Special on the radio. Australia is anything up to 9 hours ahead.

Could the Ashes stand as a dream, in time, of what conflict could look like? Where the prize is that urn, not the Black Sea coast?

As a Russian drone strike on the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv kills four, and three people are said to have been killed in a Ukrainian attack on the Rostov region in Russia, I’m not saying cricket equals war. Only that if war behaved like cricket, the world would be humane.

The Bodyline series (1932–33) was so spicy it nearly caused a diplomatic incident—politics, empire, nationalism, and identity all rolled into one. Cables flew back and forth between London and Canberra. Newspapers ran nationalistic, agitating headlines. England’s tactic was to bowl at Australian batters’ bodies at terrifying speeds. Today, these two nations enjoy £22.6 billion in trade annually.

Maybe that’s why I keep going back to the urn. I know it’s absurd, this doll-sized perfume bottle, but imagine if that were the extent of the conflict in Eastern Europe. In other words, a contest played out over a toy, watched by people eating sandwiches, with breaks for tea. No annexations, no drone swarms, no queues for generators in the snow. No death. Just a five-day argument about swing bowling.

I suppose it’s no surprise so many writers have enjoyed cricket. Not just P. G. Wodehouse, Arthur Conan Doyle, C. L. R. James, Harold Pinter, Rudyard Kipling, Siegfried Sassoon, or the recently deceased Tom Stoppard, but also postwar avant-garde figures like Samuel Beckett.

I always liked that this soft-spoken contrarian played first-class cricket for Trinity College Dublin, making him the only Nobel laureate with a cricketing record. Wisden, the cricketing bible, described him as “a solid left-handed batsman and useful medium-pace bowler.” Godot in the slips.

For me, the urn remains a valuable reminder that nations can compete fiercely without destroying each other. It’s just that the real world keeps playing in the wrong arena.

I am all over the place since the First Test, which Australia won. But then, as Russia kills at least another seven people in a fresh missile and drone attack on Kyiv, maybe the point isn’t that cricket offers escape—it offers contrast. A reminder that conflict doesn’t have to be waged by people who never agreed to the rules, or by leaders who refuse to accept any loss of face.

The Ashes thrives on rivalry that stops short of ruin. Ukraine suffers from a rivalry that crosses every line, even among its peacebrokers. Initially, Americans claimed the Ukrainians had agreed to the deal. Reactions were sceptical.

Maybe if the world had even a fraction of cricket’s respect—for adjudication, for walking when you know you’re out—we wouldn’t need so many frantic peace plans, real or “DimWit.” The urn remains tiny. The stakes in Ukraine remain enormous. And between the two sits, I guess, the uneasy hope that someday our worst disputes might once again fit inside something so small.

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