Ashes relations remain robust in an environment of deepening anxiety about giving offence

Ollie Robinson became enemy number one in Australia following his expletive-laden dismissal of Usman Khawaja in the first Ashes test.

Zac Crawley expects England to win the Lord’s Test by “I don’t know, 150 runs”. Ollie Robinson has expressed surprise that Australia were “reluctant to go toe-to-toe with us” at Edgbaston.

For the latter and his other temerities, Matthew Hayden has deemed Robinson an “ordinary cricketer”, Justin Langer predicted he will be “ripped apart”, and Michael Clarke that opined that he should be “back playing clubbies”. Oh, and Jim Maxwell thinks Jonny Bairstow is “overweight” and “not a wicketkeeper”.

I could go on, but you get the idea. As much a part of the soundscape of an Ashes summer as willow on leather is the mutual baiting and back chat of the rival camps. Perhaps it is a little riper than usual, given the kulturkampf of Bazball v CumonAussie. But in a game where the wait is almost as much a part as the play, this cheerily contained antagonism is what we live for.

And maybe, just maybe, we could do with cherishing it a little more, given the backdrop of the release of the scathing Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket report, which says the game is “rife with racism, sexism and elitism”.

The conclusions can hardly surprise many. Sexism and elitism in a country where three of 57 prime ministers have been female, and 44 have come from two universities? Who knew? The shock would surely be if cricket were found to be a rainbow-hued, classless and colourblind utopia within the nation.

The only plea to be made in mitigation is to wonder how well any cricket nation would fare under such unsparing analysis. Not only has Australia promoted just two Indigenous male cricketers in its history, but India only four dalits and Sri Lanka not a dozen Tamils. And while there are greater grounds for optimism about women’s cricket than ever, the base remains way low.

Be that as it may, England and Australia take the field at Lord’s in a spirit at odds with the frequent lamentation that “you can’t say anything anymore” – because, where the Ashes is concerned, frankly, you can.

What Australia’s longest-serving prime minister Sir Robert Menzies said 60 years ago remains true, that the length and strength of the rivals’ cultural connections provide a licence for their disinhibited relations.

“Great Britain and Australia are of the same blood and allegiance and history and instinctive mental processes,” said Menzies. “We know each other so well that, thank heaven, we don’t have to be too tactful with each other.”

They can even, at times, borrow from one another. Ollie Robinson, of course, was quick to excuse his Edgbaston expletives by reference to Ricky Ponting; there should be a prize for the first Aussie to invoke Joe Root in the context of their own reverse ramp.

English crowds have grown as boisterous and partisan as their Australian counterparts, and Australian cricket administrators been quick to co-opt English innovations, from the six-ball over to one-day and T20 formats.

So many of the latter are here at the moment, in fact, that there can hardly be so much as a club secretary left down under.

So how have Anglo-Australian cricket relations managed to remain so robust in an environment of worsening anxiety about giving offence? Cultural and ethnic similarities certainly help. But while India and Pakistan have millennia of shared history, in cricket terms they seem barely able to stand the sight of each other.

It’s not like there aren’t sensitivities either. When Ponting bristled about Robinson the other day, one was reminded of the remarks of a notable observer of antipodean cultural mores, who said “that the Australian, while impatient of criticism from without, is not given to criticising either himself or his country”.

Robinson says he won’t back down from his upfront approach, despite criticism from former Australian players.

There may be something in sentiments uttered by Menzies’ great prime ministerial peer and rival John Curtin in a speech at Mansion House on his only visit to England in May 1944, and reported with approval in Wisden the following year.

The lines, often quoted, have a pleasing ring but an underestimated subtlety, in the way they balance the very important and the apparently trivial: “Lord’s and its traditions belong to Australia just as much as England.

“We are defending the City of London and those 22 yards of turf which we hope will be used time and time again, so that the Motherland and Australia can decide whether the six-ball over is better than the eight-ball over.”

It seems to me that this goes to the very heart of the Ashes’ appeal – the relishable freedom to treat what’s ultimately quite unimportant as a matter of life and death. Lots of things these days come with an importance that is irresistible, embedded and exhausting; the Ashes’ significance is uncoerced, simulated, playful, our own creation.

It’s incarnate in the quasi-religious regard for a 10.5cm, 22g terracotta urn originally designed for a woman’s perfume; it’s in every story podcast listeners have shared with me following the climax of the first Test, from a father on a family holiday near Uluru who stood for hours in the freezing darkness with a satellite dish so his 10-year-old could hear the commentary, to an Englishman in Connecticut who timed his walk from a conference call to a school pick-up perfectly to allow the Cricinfo app to refresh.

Perhaps most of all is it in every huff and puff of rival players and fans in the Ashes tradition, on the brink of permissible rudeness, but with a laugh blessedly never too far away, and a pleasure in the ease of pushing each others’ buttons.

You might be wondering, for instance, about that shrewd observation of Australian prickliness where criticism is concerned. Donald Horne? Barry Humphries? Nope: Douglas Jardine.