Why England shouldn't win at Trent Bridge

Saturday in Amsterdam may have been Gay Pride Day for the pink-clad thousands cramming the squares and canal-side cafés, but the plan had been to wallow in day four of the Edgbaston Test at the only bar in the city with impeccable cultural taste. England, though, had put the mockers on that.

To aggravate matters, they had done so by displaying, collectively if erratically, two virtues only a small proportion of Poms have never been convicted of exhibiting in the same match: efficiency and adventurousness. Jane Austen would have killed to have crammed her novels with anything like the mix of pride, prejudice and betrayal gnawing at this column's conscience.

Instead, it found itself in another bar, being hypnotised by Eurosport - champion broadcaster of the myriad sports Britain neglected to invent, almost invariably with good reason. Welcome, in this instance, to the world diving championships, where efficiency and adventurousness are the bare necessities.

Despite its dubious premise (surely, when diving off a cliff, the straight, no-frills approach is likelier to spare your life?), it was all rather compelling at first. One shaven/cropped head after another mounted a board ten metres up, then pirouetted/backflipped/jacknifed/corkscrewed and somehow found time and space to swoop into the pool like an arrow. The aim is to marry artistry to complexity, and as each sleek young man strove to astound with something unfeasibly unique, it was impossible for this dedicated non-swimmer to fault them on either count.

Each dive was accompanied by a routine succession of images: shot of coach praying/willing his boy on; shot of coach/parent/child applauding; shot of diver returning to (presumably) the showers; shot of said diver making a polite two-fingered salute or - as an exotic variation - blowing an absolutely non-erotic kiss.

It couldn't have been squeaky-cleaner. The competitors didn't come within shouting range. There were no boos or jeers, no sledges, no full-throated inquisition of the judges' sanity. The only aspect that didn't feel stage-managed and pre-packed was the dives themselves - and they consumed about as much time as it takes to say "Michael Clarke could do with a few runs at Trent Bridge."

After 20 minutes, unsurprisingly, the dedicated non-swimmer concluded that for anyone irretrievably biased towards games involving teams and balls, this held about as much potential for a love affair as Harbhajan Singh bumping into Andrew Symonds at the MCG and spilling his beer. The thought that succeeded it was more perplexing, not to say grossly unpatriotic and mightily ungracious to the eminently worthy representatives of both the nation and Waitrose plc: please, England, don't clinch the series in Nottingham.

There is a precedent for such rank treason. Rewind to The Oval, 17 Augusts ago. Sri Lanka are dominating one of their irregular Tests in England (not quite as irregular, mind you, as Bangladesh's insulting ration, which may supply a measure of retrospective consolation). Suddenly, a not-terribly-guilty desire for the visitors to prevail makes the perilous journey from thought to expression. Within earshot is that impish glovemeister Alan Knott. Cue a quiet but surprisingly forceful scolding.

He was adamant: British journalists, indeed all Britons, were duty-bound to support the national XI. The counter-argument was twofold: 1) Sri Lanka deserved the encouragement of a series rather than a spasmodic succession of one-offs; 2) Only by beating England could they generate the respect required for such a step. Given his ardent Christian faith - which enabled him, he firmly believed, to defend touring apartheid South Africa - it was easy to envisage the nation's greatest-ever stump-minder sympathising with such a rationale, but he wasn't having any of it.

Had there been any justice, one strongly suspects, he would have arranged an armed escort to the Tower of London. Right now, given this column's jumbled emotions, he'd probably dispense with the formalities and demand a swift hanging, drawing and quartering.

For this fully qualified Pom, naturally, regaining the Ashes - coupled with the equally delicious prospect of the rather lovely Jeremy Corbyn becoming leader of the Labour Party - would make it a summer to treasure forever. Nevertheless, the defence is reasonably convinced it can make a case for justified temporary disloyalty. The opening argument, if nothing else, would be the essence of succinctness: "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury - are you really willing to allow anticlimax to ruin the weirdest Ashes series of all time?"

By comparison, the 2009 edition, while assuredly oddball, stayed on the straight and narrow: on three occasions, the side ending the match with the momentum maintained it into the next one. In the absence of Salvador Dali, Damien Hirst should be commissioned to interpret this one.

A series of such epic proportions belongs in another time, half a century and more ago, when Hollywood was pumping out the likes of El Cid, The Robe, Spartacus, The Fall of the Roman Empire and Ben-Hur, as well as the only one this column was old enough to see, Khartoum, memorable for the surreal pairing of Charlton Heston as a potty English general and an over-tanned Laurence Olivier as a slimy Mahdi. In other words, epic in a not-entirely-good way.

After three lusty swings of the pendulum, the legacy of three mismatches where the outcome has been pretty much resolved by the second afternoon, it would be no exaggeration to classify this as an extremely peculiar series, at once sorely disappointing and intensely satisfying.

Satisfying because of the raw unpredictability and inter-round theatre. Not one episode has proceeded as predicted; if Moses, Nostradamus and Philip K Dick had joined forces even they'd have been stumped. Disappointing because of the weight that has now been added to the ludicrous cause propounded by the Test-shrinking anarchists (among whom Colin Graves, the ECB and Yorkshire chairman, has less excuse than anyone to dare the weather gods to do their worst). After all, if they carry on like this, commuting Tests by 20% might prove an overestimate of the optimum duration.

Let's be frank: this has borne a closer resemblance to an ODI series than the "Barnacle" Bailey-"Slasher" Mackay full monty. Not necessarily a bad thing, but not terribly, y'know, Anglo-Antipodean. Inconsistency has been the common denominator. Tides have been turned by imposition of will: first Joe and Ben in Cardiff, then Mitch Major at Lord's, then Jimmy, Stuey, Finny and Moeeny at Edgbaston. At 80.4 overs, the heftiest stand by far, a near-flawless Rogers-Smith production, has been alone in lasting the equivalent of one and a half sessions.

Let's be franker. On the whole, notwithstanding some bouts of excellent bowling, the batting has been hapless-bordering-on-brainless. So many aspirants have been disinclined to gird loins, grit teeth, thrust nose to grindstone, put shoulder to wheel and pay due homage to every other sporting cliché ever spouted about the need for selfless, bloody-minded, do-it-for-the-team, they-shall-not-pass determination. Call it application. That "taking it to the opposition" is just one ingredient in the multifaceted recipe for Test success has been lost on too many. Daring to be boring is no less vital. As with patience and obstinacy, sadly, that goes against the grain of the age.

Surely, then, we deserve an unforgettable crescendo to compensate for the downright incompetence and defeatist outlooks behind those extravagant swings in fortune. The inestimable value of the multi-match contest is that it measures quality over a significant passage of time, theoretically lessening the impact of luck, good or ill. Ends can justify means.

History, furthermore, is knocking hard. If this operatic spectacular goes to 2-2 then 3-2, it will be the first scoreline to evolve thus in a five-set rubber on British soil for 60 summers, the first in a five-setter anywhere since Australia edged India in Adelaide in 1978, and the first in an Ashes five-setter since 1903-04. And since we're getting seriously statty here, the first five-setter, ever, to see the oldest enemies trade victories with such almost-gay abandon. Nobody will ever recall the cock-ups more than they cherish the tingles.

Cricket is not the only sport where teams waver so rapidly between the omnipotent and the pitiful. Best-of-five and best-of-seven series are the currency of the North American major league playoffs; no phrase in the US sporting lexicon can match the dramatic aura of "game seven". Baseball contenders alternate hosting rights - two at home, two or three away, then back home for the denouement (let's not bother ourselves with who gets the advantage and why, other than to state that justice is just about served). Cricket is never remotely so even-handed, though that could be remedied by a World Test Championship were the biggest elephant in the room ever treated with a modicum of serious intent.

Outside those best-of-three tri-series finals staged in Australia in the immediate post-Packer period, the ruling class has never appreciated the wisdom of a venerable US sporting custom: terminating a championship series as soon as it has been decided. Since the demise of the dead rubber cannot come soon enough for this column, it therefore feels it has no choice, in all conscience, but to root against a home victory over the coming days - provided at least one of the following conditions is met:

1. It's a tie;
2. England narrowly fail to force victory after rain erases days three and four;
3. The Bossies win by one wicket, DRS speeding to the rescue after a dodgy caught-behind decision;
4. Anyone christened "Mitchell", "Steven" and "David" is banned by ICC for the second half of August, for the experimental offence of bringing the game into disrepute through blatant unoriginality.