Stuart Broad’s dreamy innings lends England a certain poetry in decay

Welcome back, then, the England Test team. We’ve been expecting you. On a weirdly frictionless third day at Lord’s England’s cricketers simply ran out of Baz. Or rather, they met a much stronger opponent in South Africa, with a bowling attack good enough to strip away the buzzwords, the marketing schlock, the vibes power, the man-feelings, to bury the adrenal highs of the early summer. And to do so with a surgical brilliance that feels all the more peculiar because it doesn’t really lead anywhere.

South Africa didn’t look like a team that is about to give up playing Tests with any serious intent in the next four-year cycle. England didn’t look like the last guardians of the old form, more like a peculiar miscellany of the under-baked and the superannuated.

And yet as ever there were notes of fascination, even on a day when England were rattled out in 37 overs to lose by an innings. There was a kind of poetry of decay in watching a 36-year-old Stuart Broad bat for England on this death rattle of a day, in the dead heat of a dying Test in a dying format, against opponents who will be back here again one day, just not any day soon.

Has there been a more entertaining lower-order batsman in England’s Test history? Not many, and none that spring to mind. Broad came to the wicket at 86 for six. There is a kind of ceremonial feel to his arrival on occasions such as these, like sending out the liveried trumpeter with his scroll, here to announce that the end is nigh upon us.

Broad is that rare thing, a cricketer with a batsman’s eye and a bowler’s heart. It really shouldn’t work. It is eight years now since that horrible blow under the grille against India that left him genuinely spooked by fast bowling, a state of affairs that