Fade in. Interior, an extraordinarily messy room with a massage bed in the middle. Clothing and footwear are strewn across all visible surfaces and large bags are scattered haphazardly across the remaining floor space. Pads and bats are piled up, leaning against benches and walls. Exposed pipes meander around the ceiling, not in a trendy architect‑inspired Pompidou‑Centre way but just in a couldn’t-really-be-bothered-to-hide-them way. In the corner a television is attached tightly to the wall, so that instead of facing into the room it points straight ahead, allowing hardly anyone to watch it comfortably, especially given that it’s almost at ceiling height.
It is, anyway, off. Television is not being watched in this room, it is being produced. A solitary figure stands amid the clutter: it is Matt Smith, BT Sport’s Ashes anchor. “This is the England dressing room here at the Gabba,” he says. “This is where the magic or the misery happens. That [he indicates the only space in the entire room where someone has actually folded their laundry] is Joe Root’s corner. What he says in here over the next few minutes might be – might be – pivotal for what comes over the next few weeks.”
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