All was quiet at the Grange Hotel in Tower Hill first thing yesterday morning. No enraptured throng or retinue of dolly birds awaited Andrew Strauss’ Ashes-winning team; the players were abed, or abar; the media stood around basically interviewing one another.

Behind closed doors, the celebration was undoubtedly more raucous. But the subdued note struck was probably no bad thing, for England remain a modest team with much to be modest about – something, to his credit, that Strauss seems to grasp.

‘When we were bad, we were very bad,’ acknowledged Strauss in victory. ‘When we were good, we were good enough.’ The Saatchis would have admired such crisp phrase-making. England were minutes and inches from going one-nil behind at Cardiff, and stuffed so completely at Headingley that it almost counted as two defeats.

In three sessions, bowling talent met ideal conditions: at Lord’s, England took six for 69; at Edgbaston seven for 77; at the Oval eight for 72. Otherwise, only Flintoff on the last morning at Lord’s rose above the circumstances, and the performance left him spent for the rest of the summer. England’s top order, meanwhile, looked counterfeit without its Kevin Pietersen watermark. Vice-captain Alastair Cook, Ian Bell, Paul Collingwood and Ravi Bopara all averaged less than 30.

Perhaps the most intriguing is Ian Bell. In mathematics, a Bell curve describes the graphical depiction of data clustered round a mean. In cricket, an Ian Bell curve describes a tendency in scores to produce an average of 40 while nonetheless remaining largely devoid of character or authority.

It’s a cliche to say that Bell is hugely skilled while lacking temperament. But executing a cover drive is not a skill – it is a proficiency. Innings are not static exercises in stroke production; they need to be organised. And at this, five years and nearly fifty Tests into his career, Bell remains a novice, a curiously passive batsman, with strokes to make a purist swoon, but so grooved in his own game as to seemingly forget the game he is playing.

Fortunately, the captain himself is in his batting prime, game refined and rationalized, limits understood and explored, his 474 runs at 52.66 at the top of the order securing him the Compton-Miller Award previously won by Flintoff and Ponting. Like one of Napoleon’s lucky marshals, too, he enjoyed good fortune, with the toss, with the umpires, with the pitches.

Above all, he radiates a priceless sang froid in action. To watch him on the second evening, hemmed in by close fielders but enjoying the contest enough to smile, was to see a man in harmony with his task. His task now is clear: to do rather better as a custodian of the Ashes than the England of four years ago.

At the time, it soon became clear that England had geared themselves to beating Australia and…errrr….that’s it. After going on their bus-riding bender, they learned there was a little more to cricket than a single series, and looked as confused as Kevin Pietersen on meeting Cherie Blair.

Never quite absorbing their new discovery, they were duly humiliated in Australia. Thus Strauss’s comment on Sunday: ‘Last time we had not won the Ashes for 18 years so it was a step into the unknown. To a few of us this time it is familiar. We have to be conscious that this is a stepping stone, not the end.’ The next stepping stone is South Africa this winter; it will also be a considerable step-up. No wonder nobody’s getting carried away.

2-1: it’s a curious scoreline. It looks and can be definitive. England won the Ashes of 2005 by such a margin, having been, session after session, every bit the better team. England 2 Warne 1 might have put the matter more succinctly.

England’s success four years later by a similar margin is a great deal less marked. One suspects that the teams could continue playing some months yet and still be hard to split. In the nine-Test series of which Lily Allen fantasised last week, the likeliest result would be 4-3, with the winner and loser far from clear.

No power on earth should have prevented Australia winning the First Test at Sophia Gardens. That Monty Panesar and Jimmy Anderson did has seemed increasingly absurd. Ricky Ponting’s critics are mainly opportunistic and captious, but his underuse of Ben Hilfenhaus, overuse of Marcus North and misuse of Mitchell Johnson on the last day are all decisions he has probably quietly revisited.

Johnson’s blow-out on the first day of the Second Test at Lord’s, meanwhile, must be one of the curliest conundrums to have faced an Australian captain. To bowl or not to bowl? With injury to Nathan Hauritz, Ponting had not so much a bowling attack as a defence, and actually did not do a bad job of marshalling it. But by the end of the second day, Australia had fallen too far behind to make a game of it, valiantly though they fought.

In fact, if there are grounds for optimism from Australia’s performances this summer, it is that they fought consistently, even if it was mainly their own inadequacies making this necessary. Their second innings at Lord’s, Edgbaston and the Oval evinced a character probably out of proportion with the available talent; England’s rout at Headingley was the equivalent of a massacre, a suicide pact and a mass desertion combined. Individually, too, the Australian players will probably receive higher marks than their team, and the anomaly of the team’s statistical dominance should act as a challenge to them, while also acting as a standing reproach to every statto.

No individual in his team was so fascinating as the captain himself, whose cricket and life have taken an unanticipated turn. He is essentially leading Allan Border’s career in reverse, being born in the sunny uplands of abiding success, now plunging deeper into the valleys of diminished expectation.

Ponting will rue misfortunes with the umpiring, and also with the coin, especially at The Oval, even if Headingley provided a choice example of the genre of the good toss to lose. And while he will hate the thought, he has made a good loser this summer, quietly living up to the lofty sentiments about the ‘spirit of cricket’ for which he was earlier in the tour vilified.

Cricket Australia’s chief executive James Sutherland has opined unprompted that it would be ‘totally unfair’ to sack Ponting, which is a little strange, seeing it’s hard to imagine on anyone’s agenda, and it might even act as one of those statements by the boards of football clubs expressing their ‘full support at the present time’ for an unsuccessful coach.

Ponting, in fact, has Margaret Thatcher on his side, or at least the old Tory apothegm: TINA. There Is No Alternative to him as leader, or indeed as number three. The position of an ambitious deputy in an unsuccessful side is a fascinatingly ambivalent one: each failure invites the consideration of alternatives. He has been so squeaky clean in his demeanour and so excruciatingly dull in his public utterances on this tour that it has been just a little cloying.

Yet much as he may covet higher honours, and for all the splendour of his outings as Lord’s, Edgbaston and Headingley, Clarke seems to understand that he is not quite ready; indeed, that the Australian team is not quite ready for a change so convulsive in a period where the surrounding change has already been so significant. The Australians will have a hard enough time in the next little while making sense of the scoreline 2-1 – or, in their case, 1-2.