England lose a Test match against Bangladesh and we’re playing the shame game again. Such defeats cannot be merely regrettable let alone explicable but have to be characterised as ‘humiliation’, a national disgrace and an indignity that demands the players should be pilloried. As much as it represents an abasement of our language, this instant hyperbole of damnation, it also embodies the degradation of debate about the game, the ‘606-isation’ even of cricket.

In 1882 after defeat by Australia at the Oval, there was rueful humour in the death notice placed in the Sporting Times which inspired Ivo Bligh to “regain those Ashes” the following winter. Now there is fury.