Spare us the whinging, England. The only thing embarrassing about Old Trafford was your tantrum

“You want to get a Test hundred against Harry Brook?” Ben Stokes asked Ravindra Jadeja.

“F---ing hell Washy, get on with it. Get on with it, mate!” Brook goaded Washington Sundar.

Ben Stokes (left) and Ravindra Jadeja exchange words at the end of the match.Credit: Getty Images

“How long do you need, an hour?” complained Ben Duckett.

“You shake our hands and it’s done. You want the hundred, that’s what you want. Embarrassing,” concluded Zak Crawley.

Another comprehensive moral victory for England, then.

India’s refusal to shake hands when Stokes offered the draw with an hour to go at Old Trafford, allowing Jadeja and Sundar to reach their centuries, sparked the cricketing equivalent of a collective tantrum from England’s Bazballers.

It was an unsavoury scene, as Stokes handed the ball to Brook to bowl right arm rubbish, the fielders offered only the most half-hearted of chases, and the snide comments mounted. Jadeja’s hundred, followed by Sundar’s, were only barely acknowledged by their hosts, and the bickering continued after India did accept the draw.

India’s tour of England has been a highly watchable affair, and now goes to the Oval with the series still alive. Victory for Shubman Gill’s team would get them to 2-2 and retention of the trophy now named for Jimmy Anderson and Sachin Tendulkar, after Tiger Pataudi’s was retired.

Increasingly, the balance of world opinion favours an Indian win in the final game. Why? Because the posturing that accompanied England’s Bazball revolution has got to the point that even some among their countrymen are beginning to tire of it all.

There is also the fact that the self-appointed great entertainers, all about saving Test cricket and making the game more enjoyable, are now increasingly inclined towards the kind of flinty attitudes held by teams rather more concerned with winning. The contradictions are piling up.

Steve Smith, for one, picked this up during the Manchester Test.

“They have started to play a little bit differently in the last couple of weeks in terms of playing the situation, as opposed to going out and trying to be the entertainers that they said they wanted to be,” Smith told the BBC’s Test Match Special. “They are actually trying to win the games now which is perhaps different to what was said in their comments previously.”

Back in 2023, England’s posturing included barbs about having effectively won a game at Edgbaston that they actually lost, then a flurry of indignation at Jonny Bairstow’s legitimate stumping by Alex Carey at Lord’s. This was closely followed by dog whistling to ensure that Australia’s players were given hell for the rest of the trip - the unpleasantness escalating even to death threats.

But of course, England did not win the series nor regain the Ashes. Similarly, they are yet to win a series against India under Stokes and Brendon McCullum. And their white ball team has slipped a long way from the heights of the 2019 World Cup, and got to the point last year that McCullum was asked to take over the all-format program.

So this year, with India and the Ashes both looming large, there has been a rhetorical shift towards more pragmatic cricket, but also more unpleasant behaviour on the field, in search of tactical advantage.

Open discussion of team meetings where tactical sledging was discussed certainly raised the eyebrows of Australian players, seven years after their own descent into the infamous Cape Town Test and all the introspection that followed.

Members of that 2018 team are well aware that the path of sledging and unsavoury behaviour is a slippery one, leading to ever-greater animosity. They were amused to hear Stokes mimic their old phrase after a spiteful Lord’s Test match: “At not one stage did we go over the line.”

The Australians also recall that if the sledging didn’t work, it would result in a backlash of commensurate fury from the likes of AB de Villiers or, some years earlier, Brian Lara.

McCullum has even called in Gilbert Enoka, his old friend from the New Zealand cricket team and a longtime advisor to the All Blacks, to help shape the culture and identity of England’s Ashes challengers.

Enoka still has some work to do. Faced with an Indian side that did not want to dance to their tune, England looked churlish, bad-tempered and even a little bit brittle: happy and jovial when things go their way, but sulky and childish when they don’t.

In Australia, the touring players will need to stick tightly together if they are to be the first England team to win a series or even a Test match here since 2011. Sledging and moral posturing won’t help them any more than it did at Old Trafford.

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