Edgbaston, August 2005, in a parallel universe. Australia need three runs to win. Stephen Harmison bowls a bouncer. Michael Kasprowicz gets a faint glove on the ball. Geraint Jones tumbles to his left to take the catch.
Billy Bowden raises a bent finger. “Jones ... Bowden!” croaks Richie Benaud. England have won by two runs!
But wait. All of a sudden, England’s celebrations are cut short. Kasprowicz is making the T sign with his arms to request a review.
On replay, it emerges that his glove was off the bat handle when it made contact with the ball. Under the laws, he is not out. Next ball, with a dull inevitability, Harmison gives away five wides and the match. Australia claim a 2 0 series lead and go on to retain The Ashes comfortably. At the time of writing, Freddie Flintoff is a nightclub bouncer in Preston.
Eight years on, we wake to find the nightmare has been made real. England’s instant of victory was a curiously unsatisfying experience. Nor for the bellowing, barbecued fans at Trent Bridge, who, with their ebbing and gushing undulations of noise, could validly count themselves as participants.
But for the viewer, there was just the merest whiff of anticlimax to the finale. After three years of build up, 384 overs of cricket and roughly two dozen mentions of David Gower’s butler, the result of the first Ashes Test was handed down to us from a dark upstairs room by a man whose face was not seen for the entire five days of the match.
Controversy has a habit of seeping into sport like water into a crack. On Saturday evening, the commentary team even wondered aloud whether a shrewder umpire than Aleem Dar might have covered his back by giving Stuart Broad out in England’s second innings, given that England still had reviews remaining and Australia did not. This, clearly, was bananas.