It hardly felt as though Australia had ‘won’ the Ashes or that England had ‘lost’ them

Pat Cummins smiles at the fans as he leaves the players balcony for the end of match presentations during day five of the Ashes at Old Trafford in Manchester.

Very little happens for the first time in cricket or cuts only one way. Ten years ago, it was England who retained the Ashes at Old Trafford when rain ruined the Third Test with England three for 37 chasing 332, rendering it impossible for Australia to overtake their 2-0 lead.

I remember it well. The presentations occurred in a dark, largely empty ground, with Alastair Cook conceding that the weather hadn’t “been ideal’’ and that “it was a slightly strange feeling’’ to resolve the series in such a way.

Not that there was much sympathy for the Australians at the time: lose two Tests by any margin and you make yourself a hostage to fortune; it’s only the generosity of the five-Test series that offers the possibility of redemption, which is mostly illusory anyway. In 141 years of the Ashes, only a team led by Bradman ever managed to turn around a two-nil deficit in the Ashes, because a Bradman is what it takes.

It was a similarly dismal way for custody of this instalment of the Ashes to be decided at Old Trafford yesterday, with the players who have played five weeks of such red-blooded cricket out of sight except in the highlights playing on a rain-smudged loop on the twin video screens, Bazbath supplanting Bazball. The fantasy of two-all going to The Oval had been enchanting to both sets of fans; only the dimmest partisans so crave trophies as to be gratified by non-results.

Yet, as in 2013, the key to these Ashes lies not here in Manchester, in a Test that, for all England’s dominant position, was not decided, but in those Tests that were concluded, however narrowly, in Australia’s favour, at Edgbaston and Lord’s.

England’s batting has been brilliant to watch this summer, forcing Pat Cummins into some of the most defensive fielding formations an Australian captain can ever have set, with fewer slips than sweepers and nary a bat-pad catcher.

Ben Stokes waits at the post match presentations after drawing the Ashes 4th Test.

But that batting also let England down at crucial moments: on the fourth day at Edgbaston (England three-down and leading by 136 fritter away five for 100), and the third day at Lord’s (England one for 188, all out 325 to trail on first innings), Australia were clawing at the air when England offered them a share of a window ledge to hold onto.

To be fair, England learned from these setbacks. Marnus Labuschagne paid them a fair-minded tribute after play on Saturday night in batting away the inevitable question about Bazball, which as a description he said underserved England: at Old Trafford in particular, Labuschagne noted, Ben Stokes’ team had “adopted different styles’’, having “taken the game on when it was time to take it on’’, but also on occasion “sat back’’ and consolidated.

Alas for England, a little Australian edge in experience had already stood them in good stead through two nipping finishes, in the latter of which they played the match’s second half with ten fit men.

Captain Pat Cummins is interviewed after retaining the Ashes.

It’s the absence of that eleventh man, Nathan Lyon, that Australia has felt acutely at Headingley and Old Trafford, not least Pat Cummins, off whose captaincy Lyon’s durability and economy has taken such pressure. It’s no disgrace to say he was flummoxed by the challenge of managing an attack with first a junior slow bowler then no slow bowler: never mind Mike Brearley; it would have taxed Alan Turing.

Coming into this Test, Cummins professed himself renewed by his nine-day break. But he was like the man who returns from holidays only to find himself again feeling knackered after a few days back at his desk: his pace was down; his variation was minimal; his five full-length Tests in forty-six days is a ridiculous regimen for a fast bowler, least of all one who also captains. And there is another starting in three days because, of course, we must have The Hundred.

Let’s see what happens at The Oval, of course, but there is a good argument that England will end this series a better team than when they began and Australia a little poorer. Certainly the gap between the teams that yawned in 2021-22 has been decidedly narrowed. In that spirit, in fact, here’s a tentative thought.

Covers on the wicket as puddles form on the outfield at Old Trafford.

Convention dictates that the Ashes can only change hands if won outright, by a margin of at least one Test. Yet it is a convention of mysterious provenance, understood rather than codified. And I wonder whether it is quite fair, given that it confers a sizeable advantage before the teams even start, by effectively lending the draw a weighting that favours the holder: no clearer example could there have been than this Old Trafford Test.

Perhaps it is time to revisit this custom, to make provision for the Ashes to be shared. Looking out over a sad and sorry Old Trafford yesterday, it hardly felt as though Australia had quite ‘won’ the Ashes this summer, or that England had ‘lost’ them. On the contrary, it’s been a series you’d be happy to have had go on forever.

It can’t, of course. And we can be too fussy about these things, not least when we already compete for a trophy that never actually leaves its cabinet. As m’learned friend Michael Atherton, in the context of umpiring, once averred: “Life is unfair. Why should cricket be any different?’’

England's Stuart Broad (L) and England's James Anderson (R) chat as they come back after playing football to warm-up as rain delayed the start of play on day five.

But how to explain to the uninitiated the Oval Test’s weird hybrid character, of being “live’’ where the outcome of the series is concerned, but “dead’’ in the context of the Ashes? I know cricket’s not meant to make sense. But it might, on occasion, at least try to do so.