The new trains on the London Underground seat 252, but morning most running southbound on the Victoria line were holding many more than that. At 9.35am, it was standing room only from King’s Cross onwards. A London weekend in late summer and everyone’s got somewhere to go. Some shopping at Oxford Circus, some strolling in Green Park, some sightseeing in Pimlico, some switching trains at Victoria and some, lucky few and happiest of the lot, on their way to Vauxhall to watch England slide to defeat. Spot them, as ever, by their smiles, sun hats, England kit, plastic bags stuffed full of sandwiches, and papers folded open to the sports section.
Like the three seated in the third carriage: a father, his friend and his son. The two adults talking about shoes and ships and sealing wax till the boy, perhaps six years old and sporting a shocking mop of strawberry blonde hair, cut in: “Do you think we will we get to see Ben Stokes bat today?” A good time, this, to be an England fan if you’re a ginger kid. Stokes plays the game the way children dream it. The father grunted in demurral. The boy bit his lip. “I hope we get to see Ben Stokes bat.” You suspect he was happy enough to see England’s top order collapse, seeing as it only meant he was more likely to get his wish.
Batting would, it turned out, have been a generous description of whatever it was Stokes was doing during his short stay in the middle. He walked out, pawed at a couple of passing balls, nicked one to slip and then walked off again. It was a little like watching a bear come out of his cave after hibernation, then change his mind and decide to go back inside to sleep for another week.
With the singular exception of Alastair Cook’s batting in the second innings, England have been awful. But no one really seems to mind much. There was a banner hanging from one of the windows in the block of flats over the back of the ground: “Calm down, we’ve won.” Which about covered it.
The sky was clear, the sun was out, it was just hot enough to feel you’d earned your thirst and the Test was on. Why worry? Happy days like these have been too few and far between in the past 18 months. Between the two thrashings in Australia – one in the Ashes, another in the World Cup – English cricket has seemed, at times, something to be endured rather than enjoyed. A game played by embattled players, watched by bitter fans, written about by miserable journalists, run by unpopular administrators. It’s better now. Ashes victories tend to give things a rosy tint. But there’s more to it than the series scoreline.
Flick back six months to the spring. In March, an ECB strategy document was leaked to the press. One of the details was that the new management wanted the “England team to be relevant to the community with cricketers as folk heroes”. Sounds silly. You find folk heroes in Sherwood Forest and at the Cafe Wha?, not on the cricket pitch, but the ECB chief executive, Tom Harrison, explained more about what they meant during an interview with the BBC on Thursday. “Winning,” Harrison said, “isn’t actually enough sometimes.” The management wanted the England to play with “character”, with “passion and personality”, to help the public “reconnect” with the team.
All of which sounds a little ridiculous. But Harrison had a point. The last time England won the Ashes, in 2013, the players were surprised to find that they were still being criticised despite their victory. “Why are we given so much stick?” asked Matt Prior. “We have won the Ashes and that is all we are interested in.”
It got worse. The season of 2014, when they beat India 3-1, will go down as one of the most fractious in living memory as a minority of fans expressed such extraordinary scorn for the team you wondered why they chose to follow them at all, since they seemed to take so little pleasure in it.
So England did not just want to win the back the Ashes, they wanted to win over the public too. Hard thing to do, taking more than a few earnest words and a new hashtag or two. But they seem to have done it, even in their probable defeat here. This is not yet a great England team, but it is a popular one, and people will forgive a lot in those they like.
