Ashes 2019: England are already losing to Australia and it already hurts

That all-too-familiar, part embarrassing, part self-identifying badge of honour is back and the early signs are it's not going away

This is the thing with cricket. Sometimes it lets you believe that you’re over the rough stuff.

When your guard is down it mercifully shows you the facts and allows you to reliably conclude that your longest, darkest days were served only as an accumulative banking of interest to be traded, with no further strings attached, for manically looking into each others eyes, wildly skipping towards a handmade Dukes ball sunset together from here to eternity.

Only then, with thirst and relish and non-relent, does it shake you from your fever-induced dreaming to remind you that cricket is actually absolutely s*** and mainly deals in failure and pain.

We nearly forgot that didn’t we. Let it be a lesson to us all. Though it is now stitched in us forever, the World Cup is over, the Ashes are really back and we are fully awake and present to witness them.

We can be sure of this now because we are already losing and it already hurts. It’s a recognisable sting too. You know, the accessible one. The one you should have felt when your cat died. The one you should have voiced when your partner left. The familiar, part embarrassing, part self-identifying badge of honour that we get some kind of deep, guttural, perverse satisfaction from and, to be very clear indeed, the one that endures more than any winning ever did.

Was it really us that, with our hands on our hearts in all sincerity, spent the first three days of watching this Ashes curtain raiser blessed with flawlessly rhythmical Test cricket bristling with productive tension, genuinely telling each other ‘as long as it’s close, that’s all that matters, it’s what the game deserves’. That’s not how you will the Ashes back to England. That’s not how you’re supposed to watch five-day sport given the woolly cloak of deeply meaningful. Who did we think we were? We were the worst three days ago. Smug, spoilt, short memory-spanned daydreamers. Maybe we wished the whole thing on ourselves.

There is something about Test cricket and that twisted perception that we all have a role in the whole thing. If only I’d walked in and out of the room more often at the beginning of Steve Smith’s innings (either one), the way I had done when Tim Paine walked out to bat and re-entered the room to find him already dismissed. That must have had something to do with it. If only I’d been present in some form when Mo watched a ball pitch on his off stump, shouldered arms, continued to watch it’s intended course in a slow, straight line onto off stump itself, and then trudge off with his arms nostalgically limp either side of his body. Maybe I could have projected some kind of positivity into his decision-making. Maybe if we’d all concentrated a little bit harder in the first hour rather than texting each other constantly re-appraised predictions, Jimmy’s calf wouldn’t have felt so taken for granted.

This is the issue. Control. I’m never sure whether we want to have any, but regardless, there just is none. The first Test, but most pertinently, days four and five at Edgbaston were a reminder of just that. The slow burning decay of watching a side losing grip of a cricket match. Cautious ascendency followed by hope followed by stark helplessness. When the wheels come off, and the whole thing cartwheels off piste, the even less control it appears you have. Unfortunately simultaneous to the hurtling off script, is the increasing time you have in turn invested, so the more you have to watch to it’s conclusion.

The conclusion, in a incrementally catastrophic series of events, is often blurred by the strong sense that your field of vision is entirely embossed by Vaseline. The more we know it’s only a game, the more that hurts because it’s true, but for a moment, urgh, it feels like much more. Somehow still, despite all the slightly nauseous rivalry-baiting and the overkill, there really is something triggering about when an Australian side start dominating a game. We are forced into a flashback of the actuality that really, the losing, and the losing without control, is awful. That horrible, unspeakable, endless punch in the stomach that you just have to watch to until all your twenty wickets have fallen.

Nathan Lyon was England's torturer this time around (AFP)

To think we’d started the week with such optimism. Jus when we had dragged with us some wide-eyed, ‘Jesus Christ cricket’s actually really good isn’t it?’ World Cup converts, Test match cricket returned to confound us all again. The longest form, sure to do it’s own bit in separating the wheat from the chaff, did so in the first hour of play via it’s opening, unnervingly bow-legged act of note, David Warner’s slightly confusing series introductory knock.

To clarify for those that missed it, he wasn’t out when he was out but no-one realised he was out, then he was given out but wasn’t actually out so he wasn’t out, then he was given out when he wasn’t actually out but didn’t realise he wasn’t actually out so this time he was actually out. Got it? And that was only the beginning of five days of constantly beguiling decision making from the umpires, which eventually, as if to intentionally swap the tension for some light relief, began to resemble the two Ronnie’s answering the question with the previous answer, giving the decision to the previous appeal.

Talking of light relief, there was a time when Australia publicly picked Steve Smith for that very reason. A ‘joker’ in the dressing room. If they’d privately known they were selecting Don Bradman-incarnate you’d imagine they wouldn’t have asked him to bowl leg-spin and bat at number eight. His success through non-conformity remains a cricketing jewel, a lesson that anyone can make this game work for them despite any learned technique, and for a man who often seems to have very little concentric life circles outside of the game itself, and has done little in his time off to publicly achieve any further perception of depth, he maybe revealed the most poignant point of all in reflecting on his first back-to-back Test centuries on return.

Steve Smith made England pay (Getty)

When he had his year ban, he briefly veered off the party line. There was a time he didn’t know if he wanted to play cricket anymore at all. It was a small but strikingly moving admission from someone whose whole life has seemed to be nothing but doing that. It was fitting too that his closest counterpart in technical eccentricity, Rory Burns, was able to alleviate the burden of batting with eleven and counting past openers' perceived failures on his back and score what he will hope to be his first of many Ashes hundreds for England.

There were many stories. Some reaching the end of their arc, others just beginning. Such is the key reason of why Ashes Test series endure. This one too is loaded of them whilst only in it’s absolute infancy, but to conclude: We care about winning this series. Maybe more than we knew. We’ve been taught that. Now, for God's sake everyone concentrate from now on in and no-one, under any circumstances, wish for it to be close ever again. You never know, it might help.