The Barmy Army cleared away their rubbish at the end of the day, which just leaves Bazball to be thrown in the bin bag.
The myopia of all-out attack and never leaving a delivery is heading for the tactics dump. So are the jobs maybe of those who rammed it into an entirely unsuitable context – an Ashes series in Australia, where a stark imbalance in outcomes is a problem neither side will want us to talk about. It’s a kind of dirty secret.
The manner of England’s demise in Australia is new. The fact of it is not. Assuming the seemingly inevitable happened overnight, UK time, for the ninth time in 10 visits England will have lost the Ashes by the third Test – and for the fourth time in a row.
A contest that’s much closer in English conditions has become meat for Australian sides in their own country. They have to fight, and they have to apply the traditional Test match discipline and balance that England have become allergic to, but they win the series before Christmas, relentlessly. This latest victory is expected to have taken them 11 days of the 25 available.
Since England’s 2-1 win in 1986-87, they had lost all bar one of the nine series in Australia before the current team Bazzed into Perth.
Related articles:
They’d lost the previous three between 2013 and 2022 5-0, 4-0 and 5-0.
The now miraculous-seeming 2010-11 England victory was preceded by a 5-0 hammering and followed by one too. On that gilded 2010-11 tour, Alastair Cook piled up 766 runs, Jimmy Anderson took 24 wickets and England passed 500 four times.
Their first Ashes win for 24 years in a country where much of the wildlife could kill you and parts of the media are trying to too, psychologically, at any rate, brought relief not only for England but the north-south Ashes tradition, which was in danger of slipping into mythology.
Results since 2010-11 point to a fault line that is becoming harder and harder to disguise with hype. The billing of this tour as potentially the closest in recent memory is now in the Barmy Army’s bin bags along with the cans and the sandwich wrappers.
While Australia have reverted to their best instincts of how Test cricket should be played, England have batted recklessly and bowled inappropriately to field placings that Australia’s batters have relished. England’s No 3 Ollie Pope averages 17.62 in 16 Ashes innings and their spinner Will Jacks was cruelly exposed by England’s management.
The “has-beens” turned out to be right about the team’s token warm-up routine – one prep game among themselves.
You could go on and on diagnosing the disparities between English and Australian methods. Neither country’s cricket board however will want to hear deeper questions raised about whether the Ashes has become unviable as a home-and-away cycle.
The pattern in Australia since 1986-87 is reminiscent of the early Ryder Cups, when USA beat Great Britain or Great Britain and Ireland 15 times out of 19 between 1927 and 1977 before Europe was drafted in to help.
That imbalance was rectifiable. But the long march of Australian cricketing superiority at home suggests that dumping Bazball will not by itself bring England back next time with a 50-50 chance.
Adelaide didn’t come to break records but to see England broken and humiliated
The conceit, heard many times before, will be that England will go home and look for answers. They won’t.
Or rather, if they do, familiar barriers are likely to defeat them: the wildfire of T20 franchise fixtures, the advent of The Hundred and its annexation by private equity, which will only boost its political clout, and the shunting of red-ball county cricket into windows early and late in the English summer.
Cricket in England is no longer set up to produce Test cricketers. To be fair to Bazball, it sought a synthesis of white and red ball thinking and for a while breathed fresh life into the five-day game.
It promised a new way to live for a format under constant commercial and scheduling attack. At times it’s been deliriously enjoyable.
Australia though is its graveyard. There is no scope for England to Bazball on in home series and then just worry about the Ashes when it comes around. Too much mystique and meaning is attached to England v Australia in Test cricket to allow a series down there to be sacrificed, and then glossed over with promises to review and reform.
Adelaide’s crowd didn’t break their Test cricket attendance record for the first four days to watch the history and tradition of the game’s oldest and most visceral rivalry. They came to see England broken and humiliated.
For Australian cricket, the big gain is a renewal of vows between team and public. Who could not admire Travis Head, Mitchell Starc or Nathan Lyon. The love-o-meter has swung the other way in England, where the peacockery of Brendon McCullum’s approach feels like self-indulgence and a basic failure of intelligence.
“If you have a decent plan, it’s doable,” Zak Crawley said after day four in Adelaide. That sounded like a rare internal criticism of Bazball. Ominously though, results in Australia since 1986-87 suggest that it’s not really doable, even with a decent plan.
The combination of a white ball-dominated cricket calendar and the older enemy of infernal Australian conditions is starting to seem too tough to overcome.
The good news is that next time we’ll fall for it all again, and hope will once more outrun reality. There’s no other way.
Photograph by Gareth Copley/Getty Images