Five years ago I was given the job of following the Queen around while she made a rare appearance at the tennis in Wimbledon. Naturally I expected to hate every second of this but after the first couple of hours it became weirdly absorbing. It turns out following the Queen is very interesting once you realise how little she engages with anything or anyone round her. Basically the first rule of being the Queen is: don’t do anything, ever. The Queen doesn’t nod, wink or smile. Instead the Queen stays completely still, utterly opaque, like a small, heavy, disapproving piece of Regency furniture that has been wheeled out of the door, draped in pearls, appointed leader of the universe and quite frankly isn’t very happy about any of this.

Throughout the day the Queen wore a mint-green velveteen hat, about the same shape and size as a large soup tureen. Later on as she watched a rally on Centre Court during which every other head in the place bobbed back and forth following the ball, that lone mint-green hat could be seen still triumphantly immobile, an island of stillness among thousands of wrenching necks. We are the Queen, was the message here. We don’t look at stuff. We simply exist, regally.

This kind of passivity, the idea of power as a state of icily maintained indifference, is a very English thing. Traditionally it has been there in our sport too, most noticeably in the grand old pastoral-colonial game of cricket. It is the defining feature of Alastair Cook’s success, a batsman who succeeds when he moves less, not more, reeling in another frictionless Test hundred in the style of a grammar school boy walking home past the rough kids from the village, jaw set, tie askew, conkers whizzing past his head. It would not be much of a surprise to look up one of these days and notice Cook has spent the past two hours batting on stoically in a large mint-green summer hat.

This quality of stillness was notably absent this week over two opening days of amphetamine-grade Test cricket at Edgbaston, during which the majority of 32 wickets to fall came from balls that might have been left alone, or were left alone incorrectly. And during which batsmen on both sides skittered about at the crease like startled kittens.

Most significantly for England’s selection plans, Adam Lyth looked horribly twitchy, spending half an hour in the first innings semaphoring the manner of his own departure, before finally nicking one to slip.

In Lyth’s favour there is no obvious reason why in time he cannot learn to leave the balls that have been getting him out. Australia’s towering left-arm new-ball uber-athletes clearly take some adjusting to when the same line and length from a human-scale county seamer would probably draw a composed forward prod rather than a startled edge.

There is, though, something about a flirty opener in England that cannot be tolerated. It is here that England have struggled in recent times, unsurprisingly perhaps given the basic jiggering around with cricket’s tempo, the shaming of the dot ball, the insistence above all on action. Five of 22 players given a Test debut this decade have been openers. All of them except Michael Carberry have scored a hundred before congealing into shotlessness or a basic confusion over what and when to play outside off stump, when to stick, when to flinch.

Key to all this is the leave: the least fashionable shot in cricket, but as an opener in England also the most important. At its best the leave is a tangible presence, an act of decisive, aggressive non-engagement, a challenge to the bowler to blink first, go seeking a response and find yourself counterpunched by some maddening little opener’s nudge, or cuff or clip.

For all the talk of exciting new brands, polyvalent all-format cricketers and all the rest, the leave is still the non-shot from which everything else flows, the silence in between the notes that lets the music happen. This is in part why David Warner’s occasionally successful attempts to master opening in England – head down one day, bat blazing the next – are so absorbing, the spectacle of a pure batting athlete trying to master a skill that less talented, less ebullient, more obviously scarred and cautious players have mastered before him.

Even the most thrillingly aggressive openers of recent times have had a memorable leave. Matthew Hayden’s leave was more a preparation to smite than a ducking of battle, polo mallet raised, biceps quivering, like a cartoon mouse poised behind the kitchen door ready to inflict some horrible skull-clanging act of violence. Marcus Trescothick, the high-class aggressive opener England have never really replaced, seemed always on the verge of biffing any minor lapse of length to the fence. And yet he was wonderfully controlled and simple in his movements, never overextended, his aggression as much an attitude and a presence, a sense of strength in reserve.

If England are to see out the two remaining Tests of the current series the suspicion is it will not be their exciting new brand of whatnot that comes to the fore. Hopefully Lyth will be retained, in part because his struggles to rediscover his leave will be fascinating to watch, but in the main because he has so clearly earned his chance in domestic cricket. Beyond that the key from here, at nibbly Tent Bridge and the standard nerve-frazzling endgame at the Kia Oval will surely be the ability of the captain, England’s greatest modern opener, to set a winning example, to leave alone successfully, to aggressively un-engage those A-list left-arm new ball quicks.

This has after all been the defining quality of a career built around denial and resistance, from Cook’s first appearance nine years ago as the world’s least thrillingly youthful 21-year-old sporting tyro, all arthritic back-foot slashes and middle-aged nurdles. If there is a concern about him now it is simply that Cook has been out five times in this series playing attacking strokes. It is to be hoped, for England’s sake, the captain is gripped with a deep sense of self-loathing as a result. All five Tests this summer have been defined by the urge to go searching for a result. England’s success will perhaps be decided by their ability to come back to themselves a little, to concentrate their aggression, to wear, when necessary, the mint-green hat of the queenly leave alone.