England have spent years trying to invest their cap with the authority of continuity and uniformity that Australia derive from their baggy green, to some effect. But what, in the meantime, have they done to their jumper, whose resemblance to the kind of rubbishy promotional windcheater one finds in the bottom of a sponsor’s showbag is shown up by the old-fashioned elegance of the Australian cableknit sweater (albeit that this, too, is now marred by Cricket Australia’s cock-eyed, lop-sided logo)? Just theorising here, but might this change of attire have something to do with either money, or the latest theory about the performance-enhancing properties of rubbishy promotional windcheaters?

The old jumper should not perish unmourned. On its standard 1981/2005 highlights default setting, Sky has today been showing footage from Headingley twenty-eight years ago, and Ian Botham is impossible to imagine in anything other than the traditional English long-sleeve, tight on his torso, bare of embellishment. How someone could feel a sentimental attachment to the successor item entirely eludes me. As for the shirt, don’t get me started.

Michael Clarke has been a strangely anonymous figure on this tour for a figure with a fiancé and a financial profile such as his. The structure of the trip has had something to do with this. Like his captain, Clarke has no love for Twenty20, at which he averages a modest 17, and strikes at a positively lethargic 106 per 100 balls. His 83 from 145 balls today, however, seemed like a breath of Clarke at his bonny best, now a little further back than commonly imagined. To the end of last year’s series in the Caribbean, Clarke’s Test runs had been accumulated at 56 per hundred balls; since then, under the pressure of an increasing degree of adversity, his scoring rate had dropped to 47. It does not seem much, but it is a reflection of the harder times for Australia over the past year, and Clarke’s growing sense of responsibility as vice-captain for counteracting them.

Today we saw again the cocky, smiley Clarke, pleased to be back in a form of cricket he is at home with, and coming in with a scoreline he is familiar with (three for 325). When he pulled the boundary that confirmed Australia’s lead, one half expected him to take a little jump and click his heels like Danny Kaye. He has made a good start on putting to rights a curious disparity between his record in Australia, where he averages 58, and in other climes, where he averages 40. England may yet test a technique seemingly susceptible to the moving ball – although first they will have to move it.