Laying waste to Bazball just offers Australians an extra dollop of Ashes relish | Geoff Lemon

Adelaide comes across as a genteel city, but for a long time there was a contrasting degree of brutality to the Adelaide Test. At peak summer late in January it was a saucepan: hot, flat, home to impossibly long days. The mood changed in recent decades when it shifted to milder weeks in late spring, then further to nighttime contests. But with the third Test being a day match, and with forecasts this week as high as 39C, there’s anticipation of the old flavour returning. And if England’s 2-0 deficit becomes an Ashes-losing 3-0, we will see awaken in the Australian sporting public a concomitant lust for total destruction.

There is talk around this series of audiences craving competitiveness. Maybe true, at least abstractly during interminable months of lead-up. But let’s be real: when the Kookaburra starts flying, much of Australia has a far more potent interest in entirely the opposite direction. Something innate comes to life. The distinctive tang of a whitewash in the offing makes skin tingle, forearm hairs salute, and postures correct themselves. Five-nil is not just a Glenn McGrath punchline but a zealot’s grail. You can tell because we’re already canvassing it after two Tests. England conceding the series this week would tank interest in the UK but inspire it at home: you may well find Australians more excited about Boxing Day providing the chance for their team to go up 4-0 than for the visitors to level it 2-2 and set up a classic.

The whitewash hunger wasn’t always the way, purely on practical grounds. Wind the tape back to our prior millennium and a series ending 5-0 just wasn’t considered. There had only been one such scoreline dished out in the Ashes, at a time when England remained a wreck after the first world war, and by the other end of the 20th century, Warwick Armstrong’s team of 1920-21 didn’t live on the tip of the tongue. Draws were inevitable, and winning two or three matches was as much as anyone hoped for.

There were stirrings first when Steve Waugh’s team reached new levels of dominance, roasting a struggling West Indies team in all five Tests in 2001, then having the chance to repeat that against England in 2003, only to drop the final set at the SCG to Andy Caddick. In 2006-07 the whitewash became real, while also being viewed as the anomaly that it was: a new chapter for a team now led by Ricky Ponting, on a revenge mission after the unhealed sting of 2005 in England.

The pressure is on England head coach Brendan McCullum (left) ahead of the third Ashes Test. Photograph: Robbie Stephenson/PA

But repeating the 5-0 dose so soon after that in 2013-14, when Mitchell Johnson went on his pyrotechnic tear, led to a new expectation that Australian host teams shouldn’t just beat England across a series, but should do so in every encounter. It very nearly happened in the next two southern Ashes, kept to 4-0 in both only due to some inevitable New Year rain in Sydney and a pitch so lifeless in Melbourne that the MCG was put on notice.

All of this, whitewash as cricket zeitgeist, was in place before Bazball and its specific irritations as a current approach. The English types whose social calendars afford them the time to write “rent free” hundreds of times on the internet don’t understand that this is nothing new, just a variation in reasons to be annoyed by the same lot of people who Australians have always found annoying. The Australian perception, whose veracity readers can decide for themselves, is that this England setup has offered a lot of talk, has been both self-referential and self-reverential across several years of mediocre results with a few exciting games sprinkled in, and has come to Australia to be annihilated just as they were four years ago before all this fuss began. In short, England built themselves a rather fun sandcastle in the lull between tides.

This means that in the current series, beating Bazball is not the main point. Beating England in any form always has been. The Bazball aspect would just offer Australians an extra dollop of relish, something to make this win taste a little different to the others; a lash of vindication if a supposedly bright and brave new philosophy were to be destroyed by an Australian team largely playing normal cricket. Regardless of ill-timed contract extensions for England’s coach and captain, few survive a Ashes whitewash, and such an ending would surely also end this phase of their experiment.

So the week to come may be the week for another Bazball miracle, the game that turns this series around. But the hard flat sky dawning over Adelaide the day before the Test does not carry those signs hidden in its blue. If things go the other way, to three and zip, the momentum will be not so much downhill as downcliff, and Australian hunger on the couch or in the stands will not be sated by Christmas Day. Had England shown some fight so far this might be different, but weakness has been smelt. Pin this to whatever part of the national psyche that you wish, but whatever the score, right to the last session of the summer, Australians en masse now want to see England taken apart piece by piece.