Ashes 2019: Bliss or beaten, England’s dizzying summer of cricket has captured the nation and its next generation

The World Cup and Ashes series has provided us with some of the most gripping cricket in our lifetimes and branched itself to children we feared the sport would bypass

We all have our own personal coping mechanisms, but there are regional quirks of inhaling Test cricket too. The customs in Manchester begin before you even get anywhere near the ground. ‘You’re not going to Old Trafford are you?’ says the cab driver at the station, en route to day two after a partly washed out opener.

Gauging, not so much how to tell him that I am, but what the answer he might want to hear is, I slowly nod. For a split second, he has a visible internal conversation with his conscience before, as if dispensing a huge honour upon me, accepting the journey. ‘Get in’, he flicks his head towards the back seat, then raises a finger in proviso ‘But don’t say a word. My wife and I have been waiting for the highlights at seven every evening this summer. I don’t intend to let her down now’.

Upon gleaning a shared interest in the game, cab drivers in the south tend to fire an onslaught of personal opinion for you to block and leave in pleasantries. Here, they actively tell you to shut up. Circling Old Trafford on arrival, the short journey spent in obliging silence, the man in possession of the begrudging tariff performs an alarmingly high risk drop off job in which he is attempting to dispose of me at the ground whilst not looking anywhere near it, for fear of a glimpse of a scorecard. If he had been looking, he would have probably noticed nothing but the cartoonish grey cloud that hovered over Old Trafford and Old Trafford alone for much of this ultimately decisive Ashes Test match.

You would be forgiven to use it as conclusive evidence that the England team itself had somehow embodied the spirit of Charlie Brown for long periods of the week, where they operated in an odd sense of dreary discomfort given the unprecedented national anticipation that had set the whole event up.

It was always going to be a big ask. Like night three of a stag do, where all involved want nothing more but to be at home in bed yet goad each other on out of hollow obligation, the game’s ultimate format found itself squeezed into the ungodly month of September, exhausted, slightly put out, but still raging against the literal dying of the light. Whilst we no longer discount impossible feats of Herculean escape, but actively expect them, there was nonetheless a feeling around Old Trafford that every last bit of our emotional energy had emptied at Headingley.

Ben Stokes, for one, would have cause to feel slightly short-changed given, in a passing of the torch, Ian Botham’s heed to him that ‘life would never be the same’ after Leeds. Here, life was very much the same again. If anything, it was worse. He nicked off twice for very little and walked off clutching his side in the field, not returning to bowl at all in the second innings. This is cricket.

The overarching physical presence at Old Trafford is the temporary stand. With its borderless edges that expose the outlines of bodies against the backdrop of the sky, it can lend a brutalist presence to proceedings, towering over the rest of the comparatively contained ground. Knowingly or otherwise, it often dictates the feeling across a day.

On the end of day two, for example, with Steve Smith still there, a double ton surpassed and no-one any wiser as to how to dislodge him, a co-ordinated gathering of all the cardboard pint glass holders were unveiled in an offering of thousands to the skies. As the wind caught and swept them up, circling each other in a mini-cardboard beer container cyclone, from the press box, and no doubt the middle too, they looked like thousands of swirling white flags. There was indeed an element of surrender to it all.

After two truly heroic performances, exhaustion finally caught up to Ben Stokes (Getty)

The day previous, a rogue beach ball had been carried on to the pitch by a subtler yet unrelenting wind. Smith swept it for four. The photograph caught and subsequently adorned across papers the next day might be the enduring one of his career, a simple conclusive statement on how much bigger the ball seems to be to him than anyone else in the world.

Later on day five, the stand nearly forced England’s survival through the same native optimism that has imbued this entire summer. For a moment, as Jack Leach, cleaning his glasses almost out of superstition, joined Craig Overton in a gutsy rearguard action, there was a feeling that they could encourage the unlikeliest of heroes to another indelible feat of cricketing history.

It was a collective swelling of concentration that matched any of the breathless ones we’ve seen up until now. Overton’s sudden presence in the Test series you sensed was surreal to even himself, and it would have been fitting in a summer where we have learnt to predict nothing at all, for him to have been the one to save England. It wasn’t to be. But it was not for lack of effort of everyone present.

Steve Smith sweeps a beach ball that had blown into the middle (Reuters) (Action Images via Reuters)

Amongst it all, of course, there’s the chaos and blurring of events. Actually being at the cricket can be quite a contradictory experience. Whilst on television our hands are held through the changing nuance in batsmen’s trigger movements and bowler’s seam presentation to the point that we would genuinely have a solid plan to nullify Pat Cummins, in the ground it can all feel much less focussed. A sense of drunken malaise does tend to descend.

As Australia bat England into submission, there are two men very many pints deep discussing the question no-one has an answer for yet. A boundary. One turns to the other ‘There’s no point, you just can’t bowl to him’. Another boundary. The other responds ‘It’s useless, he’s a freak’. The man on strike hitting the boundaries is Mitchell Starc, not Steve Smith at all. There’s a lot of that. A lot of confused fraying of the edges, a man holding half a kebab at midday who’s taken it upon himself to organise the toilet queue into rigid single file; a woman who has been staring out at the game for hours and then turns to her engrossed friend to say ‘I guess this is like looking out at sea, isn’t it?’. In a way, I guess, it is

Though failure to win back the Ashes is painful now (and to those more petulantly disposed, a total waste of six entire weeks of futile concentration), this summer has provided a series of moments that will outlive any real scarring of the result here.

Jofra Archer made an emphatic entry onto the international stage this summer (Reuters) (Action Images via Reuters)

Jofra Archer’s Test debut at Lord’s. Ben Stokes’ two innings of untold genius. Nathan Lyon’s fumble. A whole crowd praying to be bored to death by a day of blocking and leaving. Jack Leach’s announcement as a Test cricketer. It has had everything Test cricket is good for. Layer upon layer of at first seemingly inconsequential events to paint a summer-long story for the ages. There has been that very specific inescapable dance between falling in and out of love with the game all on the same day, repeated ad infinitum. You suspect these experiences will be the things that live long beyond anything else. Every individual, both in witness and those involved, will no doubt look back in time and be glad to have been a part of it at all.

It was only striking after the manic euphoria of the World Cup what a challenge lay at the feet of the Ashes to maintain Test cricket’s status quo. It has provided some of the most gripping cricket we’ve seen, much of it performed by players that must be reaching dizzying levels of exhaustion. At times it has resembled a modernised ‘best of Test cricket’ over the decades. It's been timely because, if the general day-to-day observations of actually seeing kids suddenly playing cricket in parks now are anything to go by, the exploits have branched itself to a younger generation we all shared fears it was going to pass by.

The Australians have dominated large periods of this series and, in all fairness, deserve to be taking the Ashes home. I just hope that cab driver that dropped me off at Old Trafford in what feels like a month ago can see it the same way when he catches the highlights.