Following his surprise selection for the Second Test at Lord's last week, Josh Tongue was described by his captain as a like-for-like replacement for Mark Wood but, in reality, England have no such thing.
It is a little bit like realising your local supermarket has started stocking your favourite French biscuits: brilliant find, great option to have, particularly when some of the old classics do not seem to be hitting the spot as they once did. But as good as the real thing picked up in Calais? Somehow, not quite.
That is no stain on Tongue, who has burst on to the international scene this summer and has already shown enough to suggest he will be around for a while. The 25-year-old bowled well at Lord's, England's most dangerous force in the first innings, when he picked up both openers with superb deliveries, and continuing his fine record against Steve Smith (not a bad player to have some hold over) by dismissing the Australian great for the second and third times in as many knocks. He could yet keep his place at Headingley on Thursday.
But even in a fantasy land where Ben Stokes were choosing between that now infamous cartel of eight fast bowlers he once dreamed of having available for this series, Wood, in pace terms, would stand apart.
Olly Stone is quick, but his potential, even at 29, remains untapped in Test cricket. Jofra Archer is a more skilled bowler in other areas, but even he struggled to match Wood's sustained speed during a red-ball career that has been on hold for a painfully long time.
England had hoped to have Wood available at Lord's, before deciding that the Durham man, who has not played any red-ball cricket since December's tour of Pakistan and any cricket at all since his last IPL appearance in mid-April, would be better served with another week of building up his workloads in the hope that he could now play all three remaining Tests straight through if required.
Wood told Stokes he was not certain he was ready to deliver across five days and, with green on the pitch, an all-seam attack of more traditionally English-style seamers was backed to do the job. Which went, well, not brilliantly.
England's batters have borne the brunt of criticism for last week's defeat, having squandered a fine platform in the first innings, falling from 188 for one to 325 all-out to hand Australia a 91-run first-innings lead, a deficit from which the hosts never really recovered. It is worth pointing out, though, that the 1,345 runs England have accumulated across the first two Tests is more than by the same stage of any series since the Australian tour of 2010-11, when men such as Alastair Cook, Andrew Strauss, Jonathan Trott and Kevin Pietersen strung together some of the all-time great displays.
Pancake decks have played their part and England have not been clinical enough in key moments but, equally, their run-scoring has not been preclusive to success, as it was on the away series 18 months ago, when Stuart Broad grumbled that "it doesn't matter what bowlers you play if you're getting bowled out for 140".
England's inability to exploit favourable conditions after winning the toss at Lord's was a little less neatly quantifiable than their batting collapse, but no less costly, and once the likes of James Anderson, Ollie Robinson and Broad had failed to find the movement to make an early breakthrough, their collective lack of pace was shown up. At the top of England's second innings, after the short-pitch barrage emerged as both sides' only potent ploy, Pat Cummins and Mitchell Starc showed how it was done with a devastating spell of 90mph, new-ball carnage targeting the stumps.
At his best, Wood is quicker than both, probably just about the quickest on the planet, having been clocked at 97mph in Pakistan, and if hostilities are to ramp up, as expected, on the back of the Jonny Bairstow controversy, then England will have to be ready to fight fire with fire.
With Wood in line for a belated bow, they will, at least, be turning up to the gun fight with one pistol fully-loaded.
