Twenty-five days: it seems long enough to decide anything once and for all, except perhaps peace in the Middle East and who is one’s favourite character in The Wire. But after 15 days, the Ashes still seems almost impossibly tight, while also susceptible to even minor influences. Consider a matter of superficially trivial significance: the role of short-leg.

Next time you watch Shane Warne take his Test hat-trick at the MCG on 29 December 1994 with the wicket of Devon Malcolm, check where David Boon is standing to take the bat-pad chance: forward of the wicket at 45 degrees to the striker’s stumps. That was the tradition in which we were born: the crouching Eknath Solkar or Mike Smith making even defensive strokes a dangerous speculation. Not today. For Australia Simon Katich and Phillip Hughes, and for England Ian Bell and Alastair Cook, have gone under helmets and on haunches to a position at least two to three metres square of the wicket on the on side – and so far haven’t caught a thing.

Nobody seems interested in bat-pad catches any longer, and everyone rather too concerned with the slog-sweep; the emphasis of the modern short-leg, when he is posted at all, is on the catch taken from the face of the bat. It might already have had consequences in this series. Before lunch on the last day at Cardiff, Paul Collingwood (11) propped forward to Nathan Hauritz, and an inside edge rebounded to where a David Boon would have taken the chance easily. Katich was two feet too deep: just short fell the ball; just short fell Australia of a series lead.

Mind you, at least Ponting had posted someone. In the gloaming on Sunday evening, Mike Hussey took guard on a king pair to his first-innings conqueror Graham Onions. He was bound to thrust forward, but the fielder who should have been at short leg was languishing at mid-on, as though for the famous Hussey on-drive which…errr….he doesn’t play. Hussey, as an overanxious batsman is wont to do, plunged headlong at the line of the ball, thick edged onto the flap on his pad, and the ball hung in space long enough for Onions almost to bridge the distance from his follow through. Hussey stood transfixed, his career flashing before his eyes, and survived by inches, smashing the next ball through mid-off to commence a rehabilitative half-century.

Australia might still have survived had a short-leg been deputised, but Hussey would not be playing at Headingley: any runs he makes henceforward, and they may be crucial in such a closely contested series, arise from that oversight of Strauss’s, and also Test match cricket’s The Wire-like richness.