The day was transformed in Australia’s favour by the batter’s failed swish, a perfect demonstration of talent being wasted and Test matches squandered
Tough on Harry Brook, yes. But we must also be tough on the causes of Harry Brook. No child is born playing performative reverse-hoicks with a Test match to be saved, just as most acts of cult-like behaviour have their roots in a smooth-talking cult-like instructor.
For England the beginning of the end of the age of Baz started when the disciples of Baz began to deny such a thing even existed; to insist that the buckle-up-and-enjoy-the-ride stuff didn’t actually exist at all, but was instead a creation of another, much worse cult, also known in this world as “the outside”.
With this in mind, Brook’s dismissal in Adelaide was at least a tell, a moment of anti-gaslighting. No, you really didn’t imagine all that. For the England regime, a hard stop is now in sight, and in the usual way of these things, in the fire of an overseas Ashes immolation. But at least we got a moment here, an epitaph for an era, albeit one that was incoherent, misspelt and appeared to have been scrawled on a hotel napkin with a frankfurter.
It came just as it seemed something else might be happening. The French have a phrase, l’esprit de l’escalier, to describe the sudden realisation of what you should have said all along, the riposte you only think of when you’re already halfway down the stairs.
