The diminishing returns of disembowelment by eagle

England celebrate their victory in the fourth ODI at an overcast Chester-le-Street
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England mercilessly claw-hammering Australia at cricket would normally provoke intense reactions on these shores. Some would charge around deliriously hugging strangers. Others would sit quietly with a glass of ale, ruminating in the satisfying afterglow of sporting triumph, before caterwauling wildly into the night skies and charging around deliriously hugging strangers. There would be spontaneous bunting, pigeons would be publicly applauded on the grounds that they might possibly have flown over the Lord’s car park and deposited on the Australian team bus, and it would generally be accepted that the Apocalypse was imminent, but that the end of the world was a small price to pay for conquering the old foe on the cricket field.

It is a little odd, then, to see the recently-completed 4-0 drubbing, an exercise in one-day-cricketing surgery executed with ruthless precision, pass by with barely a ripple from an understandably ambivalent public. For most of the last 25 years, England thrashings of Australia were as rare as the Queen being seen doing an Elvis impression in public (which is set to be the majestic, white-suited culmination of a spectacular Olympic opening ceremony).

It might have been arguably the least noticed England-Australia showdown since Rolf Harris and Leo Sayer had a growl-off over a disputed game of Snakes and Ladders in a BBC green room in the mid-1970s, but England have been brilliant in this summer’s micro-Ashes. The continually developing excellence of their bowling has enabled their Test technicians in the top order to use their class and craft to cruise to victory. It is a potent combination that bodes well for sterner and more relevant one-day challenges ahead.

However, as a curtain-raiser this series has whetted the appetite neither for next year’s Ashes – even the most enthusiastic Labrador would lose interest if you were to let it off its lead and stand poised to throw a stick for 12 months before actually throwing it ‒ nor for this year’s South Africa series, which would be eagerly anticipated if the schedule had given anyone the opportunity to eagerly anticipate it.

In this most congested of British sporting summers, saturated both with competing attractions, such as London’s biggest ever two-and-a-half-week-long high-end school sports day, and with water, water and more water, even a Test series between the two top-ranked cricket nations was always likely to struggle to capture the wider public imagination. Has the schedule even allowed it to capture cricket’s imagination? Perhaps. Perhaps not. I admit I have not had time to canvass much opinion because I have been too busy wondering what taekwondo is, trying to buy tickets to watch horsey disco, or “equestrian dressage” as the purists insist on calling it, contemplating whether Roger Federer’s backhand could solve the Middle East crisis (and whether trying to beating an in-form Federer on grass is easier or more difficult than trying to beat an in-form Michelangelo in a ceiling-painting contest), and desperately wracking my brains to remember what happened last time England and Australia played each other in England, in another midsummer contractual obligation two years ago.

Savouring the prospect of an alluring showdown is one of the joys of following sport. This crescendo of anticipation and speculation is increasingly impossible amidst the ceaseless churn of modern international cricket, where what was once special risks becoming routine.