Australia cloud England’s mood after seeing their own tail washed away

Y ou learn as you go that cricket in England has moods. Like some figure from myth whose face changes with angle and light. The first day of the Edgbaston Ashes Test was one mood, the bucolic English summery kind that justifies the work of pastoral poets. The second, jaunty scoring gave way to a half-overcast grind under high cloud. The third, after England had bowled to a seven-run lead, a sudden darker mood flashed at the home side in a window before rain.

Rain, cloud, darkness. Few sports make you think so much about light. All countries have sun, but there is a hard clear sunshine that only derives from an Australian summer, streams of photons hurtling on their long trip through space and smashing into cricket fields, bouncing back with such force that you’d swear you can hear them ping like stones off glass. Turn on a television anywhere in the world and see Australia’s summer, so bright it washes out the blue of sky and green of grass into variations of white.

By contrast, England’s proprietorial light is defined by absence. All countries have cloud, too, but when the massed ranks of grey bunch overhead like wet wool blankets, the product of a deluged military ration store, it’s something else. See that on your television and you equally vividly know where you are. An attritional fight at a storied ground. In person, the elements are even more visceral, clouds heaving into vacant airspace like invading spaceships. Nowhere has that dimness, that dankness, while players blink and strain their eyes trying to pick up hints of dark red leather.

One of cricket’s accepted truths is that cloud creates swing. A report in 2000 from Nasa’s experimental physics branch into cricket ball aerodynamics found no plausible reason