When your Ashes tour around England extends from days into months, you start to read the local consensus. Pub talk, pundit talk and player talk overlap, sometimes divergent and sometimes repeated. When this year’s subject has been Steve Smith there has been a general despondency; for Australia’s fast bowlers a general disquiet; for the wicketkeeping captain, Tim Paine, more often a general disdain.
Perhaps this was given an early boost when a Birmingham reporter asked Paine whether Edgbaston was the most intimidating venue in cricket. Paine’s brush-off was received as an insult, as though a cherished source of national pride was to believe that a hundred drunk idiots dressed as watermelons should strike fear into the sporting heart; as though the Hollies Stand was some modern battlefield where the distant strains of the “Don’t Take Me Home” beer song came from the mouths of an advancing army, washing over the parapets and making the mud tremble.
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