England's Ashes victory, under Sunday's golden sun at The Oval, was a glorious culmination of a gripping Test series, but even amid the glee and delight, the ECB might just be worrying if the timing was a touch inconvenient.
A committee chaired by David Davies, formerly of the FA, is currently considering whether the "crown jewels" list of sporting events, which are required to be available on free-to-air TV, should be changed, with cricket always the prime candidate for restoration to the live list. And here it was on cue, a Test victory inescapably presenting itself as a national unity, "watercooler" moment, the stuff of newspaper front pages, TV news headlines and a letter to Andrew Strauss from a leader yet to overcome his own back foot struggles quite as happily, Gordon Brown.
You could argue that the idea of sporting events as moments of national coming together, which dates back to 1956, is an odd, old-fashioned principle to enshrine, yet it has helped preserve a catalogue of collective sporting memory, and some sports fans might argue vehemently it should be extended to include, for example, Premier League football. The current A list, protected for live coverage, includes the Olympics, World Cup and European Championships football, the FA Cup final, Grand National, the Derby, later rounds of Wimbledon, the Rugby League Challenge Cup and Rugby Union World Cup finals.
Cricket, controversially, managed to get itself off the A list after a 1998 review, on to the B list which protects only highlights, and the England and Wales Cricket Board has since been paid hundreds of millions of pounds for selling the live rights exclusively to Sky.
Davies's committee has been able to consider the impact of Ashes cricket being off free-to-air TV for the first time, as the drama has unfolded. They may conclude that this summer the series has been largely followed by people already in love with or interested in cricket, rather than drawing in a wide-eyed new audience, as the high drama of 2005 did, shown live on Channel 4.
The viewing figures tell the story plainly. For the final Oval Test which sealed England's great Ashes victory in 2005, Channel 4's free-to-air coverage averaged just short of 3m people, and a triumphant 7.2m peak in the final quarter of an hour when the Test was won. On Sunday, Sky's Oval coverage attracted an average of 856,000 viewers, and a peak, at 5.45pm, of 1.9m - remarkable for pay TV cricket, but not a great chunk of the nation.
Those in the majority of homes who do not have Sky have experienced this Test series in, internet excepted, rather an old-fashioned way; through the newspapers, Test Match Special, which for all its radio charm can feel a bit 1950s at times, and by watching the highlights on Channel Five, which were excellent, although deluged by adverts. Five averaged almost 2m viewers for Sunday's highlights, a storming figure for the channel, but less than a third of the free-to-air multitudes drawn to the live final stages in 2005.
Strauss's England players have dug into reserves of skill and character to pull off a landmark victory, but, you have to think, it might have come at an awkward time for the ECB, with a "crown jewels" committee set to decide whether tense, thrilling, classic encounters such as these should be available for everybody to follow on free-to-air TV, or restricted only to those paying the subscription dollar to BSkyB.
