Cancel the open-topped bus parade. Stash the MBEs back in the drawer. Slap a half-price sticker on the basket of bucket hats. Manchester woke on Monday morning to pale sunshine, a clearing mist, the fog of war lifting from the battlefield.
There will be a fifth Ashes Test at the Oval this week, and it will be big. These things always are. But it will unfold in front of a traditional audience of the pre-enlisted. The hostilities continue. But English cricket’s evangelical summer is over. “It is a massive game for us,” Ben Stokes insisted. But no longer, really, for anybody else.
