This England side tend not to do anything slowly and so their funereal crawl towards Lord’s this morning, held-up for a brief period by a Just Stop Oil protest, must have felt a strange way to begin the Test summer.
The image of a team bus creeping through Kensington in first gear behind a ‘go slow’ demonstration of cautionary banners forewarning the end of the world does not, after all, quite fit with the carefree promise that Ben Stokes’s side will carry their high-octane approach into these seismic eight weeks of cricket.
