No doubt even the cricket averse among you will be aware at some level that the England team is currently undergoing its traditional four yearly mauling at the hands of gleeful Australians under unforgiving, sun-drenched skies Down Under. Fans back home are enduring miserable nights, pock-marked by false hope, fever dreams and regret for engaging in the whole inevitable business of sporting despair but with added insomnia thrown in for good measure.

Failure in Australia means that really it doesn’t matter what England do until they win

The results on the pitch have once again been dismal, but in fairness to this team, they are simply following a trend that has seen England go winless for 17 consecutive matches in Australia stretching back to 2011. It’s their longest winless streak anywhere in the world since the whole business of test cricket began in 1877.

What is different this time is the framing of England’s failure by the Aussie media. In years gone by England have generally been typecast as effete milquetoasts, unable to hack the heat, the hard grounds and the aggressive ‘banter’ of the crowds. Australians by comparison are real men, hewn from granite, suckled on raw meat and happy to run a thousand miles across The Nullabor Plain, nonchalantly beating off crocodiles, venomous snakes and angry kangaroos along the way. The fact their army officially lost The Great Emu War of 1932 to a bunch of flightless birds is a conveniently forgotten memory. (No seriously, look it up. Their army lost. To emus.)

For sure there have been the usual laboured pre match headlines in the tabloid press. (No one does a lengthy headline like Aussie tabloids, except maybe the Daily Mail.) Starting in Perth we got a picture of Ben Stokes wheeling his bags across the airport with The West Australian newspaper screaming ‘BAZ BAWL: England’s Cocky Captain Complainer, still smarting from ‘crease-gate’, lands in Perth early thinking dopey ‘BazBall’ can take the Ashes‘. Now you........

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