England abandons Bazball but is still no match for Australia with Ashes triumph imminent

It was nearly 2.30pm local time when it started, the slow drone coming from the Adelaide Oval hill.

"We are the Army... the Barmy Army..."

The choir had been in the same position for four days now but scarcely heard, their enthusiasm dampened by the endless despair out on the field. But now, things were trending gently the other way, and the chorus began to echo.

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"And we are mental, and we are mad..."

Louder it got with every lap, louder as more and more joined in. Charlie Chaplin added his voice, then Beetlejuice, then the inflatable kangaroo. Louder and louder, this battle cry that had been aching to be released for 10 agonising days of English Ashes cricket. 

"We are the loyalest cricket supporters that the world has ever had."

Nobody could question them on that front. Sold a dream, they have travelled to the other side of the world to watch their cricket team find new and magnificent ways to lose.

They have been told their team was changing the game, saving it even, and that this series was the pinnacle of the journey. They were then told, once things had gone wrong, that this series wasn't all that important at all, and that the team had been rather unlucky really. Too prepared, if anything.

So on the fourth afternoon, just before the tea break, facing a world record chase but with the score at a pretty comfortable 2-100, the Barmy Army sensed this might be as good as it was going to get. And their song briefly brought Adelaide Oval to life.

Australia will win the Ashes on Sunday, that much is now certain. But for those in red and white on that hill on Saturday, just a whiff of the impossible was enough to get pulses racing.

Then Harry Brook tried to reverse sweep Nathan Lyon, nearly fell over and was bowled. And that was the end of that.

Day four in Adelaide was England's best of the tour so far, aside from those spent playing shirtless beach football at Noosa, and it still ended in miserable collapse and certain defeat.

England bowled well early in the day to prevent being smothered by Australia, and then batted impressively to reach 3-177 before it typically fell to bits.

It all looked very normal and competent and quite good indeed. The bowlers bowled top of off and got some edges, the batters dug in early and picked off the runs when they were offered.

England was up for the fight, and by keeping things simple even lured the Australians into a few silly errors. A collapse of 6-38 to end the third innings in theory left the game open for England, though a world record was still going to be required.

One of the trademarks of Brendon McCullum's England side has been successful fourth-innings run chases. It has pulled off a handful of ridiculous results, cruising home at times, and it has been these performances that have more than any other emboldened the team's overall philosophy.

Those chases have been completed at a furious clip, taking the McCullum theory of "putting the pressure back on the bowlers" to its fullest degree. But that's not how this chase was unfolding.

Zak Crawley took an age to get going, defending in the guise of a Test opening batter. As a result Crawley looked the best he had all summer.

Joe Root did his best to see out the quicks and then got moving against Nathan Lyon, sensibly but proactively, following a cadence very familiar to followers of the long-form game.

Brook put the big shots away for the best part of 90 minutes and snuck into a rhythm with Crawley, forcing the Australians to change their plans and allow easy ones and twos.

It's all very basic stuff. And perhaps if England had been open to this as a perfectly acceptable way to play the game — abandoning or at the very least adapting the style that has left it in a hole in this series and has struggled to beat Australia or India at any stage in the past four years — maybe it would be a decent cricket team.

Retrospection and self-reflection isn't a part of this thing though. The next time England puts up one of its physiotherapists for media duties to explain things away, we will be told going at three-an-over and defending is what Bazball has been about all along, actually, and we just aren't quite clever enough to see what Baz and Stokesy have been building.

Fair enough. Maybe the English are just misunderstood. Maybe they never said these Ashes were especially important, even though the coach himself very much called it "the biggest series of all our lives" and that is a real quote that definitely happened.

Or maybe the Ben Duckett dismissal, thoughtlessly hanging the bat out at a ball demanding to be left alone, is more emblematic of this team.

Or Brook's, who stood stunned after his castling as if he had just received the Gatting ball and not nearly face-planted while trying to play an inside-out reverse-switch tango-hook. They're like a cover drive to him, you know.

The painful truth though, which became crystal clear on Saturday afternoon, is that it doesn't matter which version of England presents itself. The Australians are simply better.

Pat Cummins was mesmerising in his working over of Ollie Pope and Joe Root, and the catch taken by Marnus Labuschagne to remove the former is the sort only ever really taken by the winning team.

The difference in the game in many ways was Nathan Lyon. Australia has an elite, hall-of-fame-calibre spinner who broke the game open with a sequence of brilliantly probing overs when England looked set, and England has Will Jacks.

The Brook wicket was a farce, but the ball to get Stokes, fizzing past the outside edge into the top off-stump, was perfect. The ball Crawley copped was nearly as good, the work finished off tidily by Alex Carey, who is yet another example of the class gap between the sides.

Australia's day of revelry will come on Sunday, and this team and its achievement will be appreciated in their fullest then.

Saturday was about England though, as so many days have been in this series. In belatedly abandoning Bazball, England showed it is capable of so much more, and yet is still nowhere near a proper challenge of Australia.