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.

Jonathan Trott today became the eighteenth batsman for England – it is still a little difficult to call him an ‘Englishman’ – to score a hundred on Test debut, and the fourth in his own team, Andrew Strauss, Alastair Cook and Matt Prior having come the same way. At the press conference tonight, Trott also suggested he would be a snug fit with the culture: ‘It’s quite hard to describe now to be honest. I’ll probably have to sit down and think about it and reflect on it…Hopefully there will be a successful result for us and it will be even more special….Obviously the selectors showed huge faith in me and I’m pleased to be able to reward them.’ A ‘to be honest’, a ‘sit down and think about it’, a ‘hopefully’ and an ‘obviously’: why, the man’s a prodigy, already a master of the most mind-deadening maxims in cricket’s lexicon. Fortunately, it was his bat that had earlier done the talking, and most eloquently. If he continues exuding such aplomb at the crease, he is welcome to as many clichés as he likes afterwards.

News Ltd’s Australian representatives here are in panting pursuit of Oval curator Bill Gordon, whom they call an ‘eccentric recluse’, apparently because he won’t speak to them, even if it’s not quite clear what he might gain from doing so. ‘Gordon is likely to stay in hiding as the state of his pitch becomes even more of a talking point with the Ashes on the line,’ they report. ‘He is under heavy fire for producing a controversial pitch where balls were already going through the top of the surface after day one, bringing up explosions of dust and bouncing randomly.’ The hapless groundman is painted as a combination of Howard Hughes and Bert Lock, the Old Trafford retainer who who prepared the pitch in 1956 on which Jim Laker made such mischief. The latter remained eternally thankful to Nasser – Gamal rather than Hussain - for engineering the Suez Crisis, thereby wiping the controversy about his surface from the front pages.

Unfortunately for the media, this looks a little like a story that may answer itself. On the ‘controversial pitch’ today, almost 400 runs were scored. The odd ball kept low – Peter Siddle gave Matt Prior an amiable smile after one bounced twice on the way to the keeper after lunch. But nothing stayed down on the line of the stumps, and while clearly dusting up, the surface has not cracked. It’s what players sometimes call a ‘one brings three’ pitch, insofar as batsmen are most vulnerable on coming in, but time spent in the middle is repaid. Players, in fact, have so far shied even from criticism, let alone condemnation. So why are we in the press so paranoid about pitches that do other than play straight up and down, and at even heights? Bowlers complain that cricket administrators are always batsmen. Might be time for journalists to fess up. Are we impartial arbiters of the game, or just batsmen in disguise?

In the Sydney Pardon Press Box at The Oval today, they are showing the Channel Five highlights package with, for some reason, the colour turned down. As a result Ricky Ponting is being interviewed in black and white, his faded baggy green a ghostly baggy grey; with the gasometer in the background, you half expect Len Hutton to be up next. It’s somehow congruent with the feel of this match so far - a polite, middle-aged audience watching some polite, middle-aged cricket.

There are, however, already shades of 1953, when Australia went into the Test without a slow bowler, relying on Bill Johnston’s left-arm variations, and England chose two, local boys Jim Laker and Tony Lock. When chunks flew from the pitch’s crust during Alec Bedser’s first over, Lindsay Hassett walked up the pitch to confide to his partner Arthur Morris. ‘I can see who this pitch has been prepared for,’ he griped. But by then it was too late. Without a specialist spinner, Australia were unable to retard England’s fourth-innings chase, and England won their first Ashes series in 20 years.

Which is not to say that I forsee a repeat of these events, although the parallels are instructive, and complaints about the pitch, such as those of my esteemed colleague Scyld Berry in today’s Daily Telegraph, are misplaced. Both teams have stared long and hard at this surface. It was open to both to choose an XI to suit the conditions; Ricky Ponting could very easily have won the toss and batted, in which case I fancy Australia would have batted far better than England. Scyld seems to allege some sort of deliberate malpractice: ‘It is an abuse of the spirit of the game to tailor a pitch quite so blatantly.’ But had the pitch been prepared according to some secret administrative fiat, one would have expected Panesar’s inclusion alongside Swann. Scyld’s theory depends, then, on believing that ECB are capable of cocking up even a conspiracy.

Hmmm, on the other hand…..

‘Ashes Match Fix Probe,’ screams the poster for today’s Evening Standard, fulfilling two criteria of good headline writing: strict factual accuracy and disingenuous sensationalism. The International Cricket Council’s Anti-Corruption Unit is investigating reports of an indeterminate conversation between a figure ‘suspected of links to illegal bookmaking’ and an unidentified Australian cricketer, who promptly reported the matter to the authorities. No information was exchanged, no inducement offered – it’s hardly Meyer Wolfsheim, really. But memories of the cupidity and venality of cricketers 10 years ago do not take much to revive, and corruption has been a nagging fear since Twenty20 began to go forth and multiply a couple of years ago. A precondition of the moral lapses of Hansie Cronje and others was a surfeit of pointless, meaningless cricket: the spread of Twenty20 contains the seeds of a repeat of that phenomenon. The Indian Cricket League’s reputation was as a hotbed of gambling, and even the Indian Premier League did not help its profile by rejecting the assistance of the ACU.

There’s no reason to think that Test cricket has been compromised since the Condon Report. The players seem well aware of their responsibilities, and also of the penalties, since the investigations of Marlon Samuels and Maurice Odumbe. Yet it’s a pity administrators continue to stack the schedules so pointlessly and heedlessly. Seven one-day internationals between Australia and England after the Oval Test? 59 IPL matches in six weeks? What better means of creating the kind of jaded, disaffected automata who slipped into malpractice a decade ago? Sooner or later, I fear, a newspaper will publish a sensational headline that exactly suits a case both in circumstances and seriousness.

On today’s Times podcast, Michael Atherton made a characteristically thoughtful point about the selection of Jonathan Trott, wondering whether Trott should be considered a representative of the ‘English cricket system’, from which, he essentially argued, the ‘England cricket team’ should be chosen. Trott, born in Cape Town 27 years ago and educated at Stellenbosch University, is entitled to a British passport through his father, and qualified to play for England in 2006. The selectors, Michael contended, risked turning the contest into one of ‘immigration policies’, rather than one of ‘English cricket versus Australian cricket’.

The point interested me because it is one he had to argue – that there is some ambiguity about who and/or what undergirds a national team. Is it representative of the nation, of the nation’s government, of all the nation’s cricketers, of the nation’s duly elected cricket board, of the first-class teams that participate in its domestic competition? There is no satisfactorily exact answer to this. In a bullish mood, for example, I suspect Australian cricketers would feel themselves to be representatives of their country; they are certainly fond of that hackneyed line about the Australian Test captaincy being the nation’s second-most important job. Mind you, when politics raises its ugly but familiar head, as in the matter of Zimbabwe, they also inclined to shrug their shoulders and say: ‘Shucks, we’re just a bunch of cricketers.’

CLR James saw the West Indian team of Frank Worrell as an instrument of political and racial emancipation, rather than as the cream of a ‘Caribbean cricket system’. The South African cricket team before apartheid, by contrast, represented perhaps a diametric opposite: a system that had adapted itself to the country’s vicious political realities, acting almost as an instrument of state. Since then it has been viewed, almost as controversially, as a vehicle for ratifying the advance of those previously disadvantaged and disenfranchised.

If the Ashes is, as Michael says, ‘a battle of supremacy between the English system and the Australian system’, then perhaps Trott is not an altogether inappropriate choice, insofar as English cricket has always been porous to outsiders, from Ranjitsinhji to D’Oliveira, from Murdoch to Greig; doubly so, if one notes that he is distantly related to Albert Trott, who represented Australia against England before representing England against South Africa. On the other hand, is cricket as comfortable with the flag-of-convenience sportsman as, for instance, Olympic athletics, with Merlene Ottey racing as a Slovenian after winning eight Olympic medals for Jamaica, and Kenya’s long-distance heroes Stephen Cherono and Albert Chepkurui racing as Qatar’s Saif Saaeed Shaheen and Abdullah Ahmad Hassan?

England, of course, isn’t the only Test team with this dilemma. Is Brendan Nash representative of the ‘West Indian cricket system’? His erstwhile captain Chris Gayle is apparently beholden to none but himself. Anyway, thoughts are welcomed. At the moment, events are doing the thinking for us.

So Jonathan Trott is to make his Test debut at The Oval. More power to him. The good news is that The Oval is perceived as an English stronghold, the bad news that it isn’t a great place to make one’s Test debut. On the last-on, first-off principle, Paul Parker, John Stephenson and Alan Wells failed, and never played again. Australians starting their careers there haven’t prospered much either. Mick Malone, Shaun Young and Dave Gilbert never got another chance against England after being capped here – Malone and Young, in fact, never reappeared in Tests. It seems all too easy, having come in at The Oval almost as an afterthought, to be consigned to a footnote later.

No Ramps? Well, you could see that coming. Yet the reasoning that making runs in Division Two of the County Championship is not a preparation for playing Test cricket is meretricious. How much county cricket of any description prepares one for, apart from playing more county cricket, is not screamingly obvious. And after all, the vast bulk of Ramprakash’s first-class runs have been at the highest possible level in England. What does Surrey’s temporary relegation matter?

Yes, there is a difference between first-class and Test cricket, but that applies everywhere, and arguably less so in England than in some other countries: one is likelier to face a bowler of international quality playing for a county than for a West Indian island or a New Zealand province. Discriminating against Division Two cricketers simply because they are in Division Two smacks of making them prisoners of circumstance. The experience of playing in a poorer team has its advantages: more chance to bat under pressure, more opportunity to bowl long spells, more necessity to really covet victory. It might even be considered a useful preparation for representing England in Test cricket.

Mark Ramprakash – man or myth? The matter of his selection for The Oval is one on which almost everyone in English cricket has an opinion, with wise advocates in both corners, including two friends of mine whose opinions I respect: Scyld Berry is pro, Michael Atherton against. As I argued for his selection at Edgbaston, you’d expect me to side with Berry now; actually I’m not so sure.

The context of Ramprakash’s inclusion for the Third Test would have been as a straight swap for Kevin Pietersen in an order that otherwise was demanding no other change, in a team that then led 1-0. The context of his choice for The Oval would have been as a national saviour, supported by the influential ballroom dancing lobby, promoted for the purposes of one-off deliverance.

Everyone is enamoured of the romance of the comeback, but the English are particularly so: see Wilf Rhodes in 1926, Cyril Washbrook in 1956, Colin Cowdrey in 1974-5. But comebacks most often fail. Cowdrey, gentil, parfit knight, was flown out of an English winter, after a five-year career hiatus to face Lillee and Thomson. The team itself favoured the inclusion of Basil D’Oliveira; the Aussies expected Barry Wood. Both might have been better. Cowdrey’s was a brave, honourable and futile gesture: he averaged 18. Most English comebacks have ended like that of Chris Tavare 20 years ago: recalled for one Test after five years on the sidelines, dismissed for two and never heard of again.

So context matters. The reason most comebacks fail is that they are desperate measures in the shadow of defeat, in weak teams that have exhausted other options. Rhodes and Washbrook were exceptions in context, coming into good teams on the brink of great deeds. I’d still like to see Ramps at the Oval: curiosity overwhelms me. But if it’s thought the best solution in the circumstances, I’ll be surprised.

Who said Australia’s captain is unpopular in England?  ‘Ponting’ appears at Kettlewell’s annual scarecrow festival, corked hat standing in for a baggy green.  English crows kept their distance, perhaps still concerned about Freddy’s fitness.