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Ah, the draw. In some respects, it’s Test cricket’s greatest asset: the positive result that can take five dull days to achieve.
After a very poor second afternoon here, a draw is England’s best hope — even after one of their most remarkable wins — following a tough second day in which Steve Smith made hay.
Yesterday afternoon had almost all the classics of a tough session on a flat pitch — two dropped catches, the wicket of an all-time great off a no-ball (bowled by a spinner for good measure), an injury scare for Ben Stokes, fifth spells for the strike bowlers Stuart Broad and Jofra Archer and even a half-century for Tim Paine.
But if England want this Ashes series to go to the wire at the Kia Oval, they must knuckle down and escape with a draw here.
Not much has gone Joe Root’s way, most notably the toss, but that is not something that concerns England. They just must bat as well as Australia — an outcome which, on recent form, feels unlikely.
It is a strange game — with so much on the line after that remarkable win at Headingley — for England to seem a little flat in, but that is how they have appeared.
Perhaps they were dispirited by losing the toss on a flat pitch and being condemned to watching Smith bat for two days.
Indeed, Smith and Australia, whose brilliant pace attack are able to take the pitch out of the equation, could not have ask for a more hospitable welcome from English groundsmen, only four years on from 60 all out.
In the field, England looked unhappy from the start, with blustery wind making life extremely hard, and word is that on day one Root felt like he had only two bowlers, Stokes and Craig Overton, who truly wanted the ball in their hand, with conditions against them all.
“There’s no point talking about the wicket, that’s gone now,” is what Jonny Bairstow had to say in last night’s press conference. He is right, but the sense was that England had had quite a lot to say about the surface — and there is really is no need or excuse for thinking like that.
England might get a little help from the weather over the weekend, but the draw is something that has simply disappeared from their cricket. They do it occasionally but very rarely having not made the running in the game.
In their last few draws — at Lord’s, Christchurch, Melbourne, Rajkot — they have been thwarted when trying to force a win, rather than holding on.
At home, they had 20 successive matches without a draw until Lord’s in this series, when they lost five sessions. You have to go back to 2014 and Trent Bridge’s flattest pitch ever to find an organic draw in England not caused by the weather. Even away, they barely draw. England are boom or bust, with very little in between.
All this is odd, given that their last generation — the House of Strauss that ran from 2009 — were known for battling for a draw. Whether Cardiff in 2009, Cape Town 2010, Brisbane later that year or Auckland in 2013, they had a way of hanging on when everything seems against them.
But they have barely done it since Root, who is playing his 85th Test here, has been on the scene. Now when they draw, it is a case of falling nobly short of a win rather than avoiding defeat by surviving under pressure. Some will blame the pervasive effect of white-ball cricket, others a lack of heart, but it is unclear exactly why when things go awry they go really awry. They can certainly seem in a bit of a hurry when looking to save a game
This weekend, they have a chance to change that narrative and save the Ashes. England have done much to improve their popularity this summer, but nothing would endear them to the public quite like that.