Maybe they’ll some day do it at Lord’s too – and a cynically calibrated, molehill-of-a-mountain apology will come nearly 72 hours later. The International Cricket Council will merely look on.
Today&’s survivors, even winners, were left dehumanised a long while before yesterday, after all. You can also take it for granted that if and when it happens, at midnight or not, those taking a dim view of it will be chastised, in the spirit of the age, for being judgmental.
But the game has always been large enough for irreverence to be accommodated honourably in its lore, with RC Robertson-Glasgow writing, all those years ago, that "the air of holy pomp started from the main temple at Lord’s and it breathed over the Press like a miasma," thereby implying that it was dear at any price. His age saw it differently, though, and his times were different.
"I look back at reports of games in which I took part, and I have thought: ‘And are these arid periphrases, these formal droolings, these desiccated shibboleths really supposed to represent what was done and how it was done? What has become of that earthy striving, that comic, tragic thing which was our match of cricket?" There, of course, were those who, despite being in positions of official importance, weren’t exactly stuffed shirts.
And they came much later, staying on to add a lot to our enjoyment of the game. Brian Johnston, in fact, revelled in being unconventional. Once he got a letter after a Test from a lady, who said how much she always enjoyed listening to his commentaries. "But Mr Johnston," she went on, "you must be more careful about what you say as we have a lot of young people listening to Test Match Special.
Do you realise what you said when Michael Holding was bowling to Peter Willey? You said: ‘The bowler’s Holding, the batsman’s Willey.’ Really, Mr Johnston, you must be more careful." Irreverence was why his gaffes, as he said himself, were semi-deliberate. "Welcome to Leicester," he once said, "where the captain, Ray Illingworth, has just relieved himself at the Pavilion End." Oval 2013 was a world away from that, though. And when life’s early social lessons are forgotten, calamitous personal mistakes are sometimes inevitable.
Not being calm in victory as well as defeat, each of which is a deceiver, is one. If you think too much of yourself in euphoric times, your self-esteem will go proportionately down when the sun has disappeared behind the clouds. Pro sport, and its props and paraphernalia screen those inside the frame from the truth, though eventually to let them down from the picture with a massive thud when the going stops being good.
After taking 19 for 90 in 1956 against Australia at Old Trafford, Jim Laker, sat quietly, alone, amid mirthful peers, and asked by the Press to explain why he’d taken so many wickets and Tony Lock, only one, said it was beyond him to explain.
Humility is a cushion against the multi-level, varied perils brought on by adversity, which is never really too far away. The flip side of the coin, of course, is ruined sporting lives in darkness-at-noon sequences in appalling tragedies. Robertson-Glasgow wouldn’t have liked it one bit of it: cricket, to him, was a celebration of life, one of its very, very wholesome aspects.