Just Ask AB, Aggers' Ploy May F****** Do Trick, Too

I’d half been expecting it, but when I walked into the golf club bar and the steward said (in a voice even graver than he used on the day the Guinness ran out): “It’s war,” it still came as a bit of a shock. “Who started it?” I enquired. “Was it Trump? Or that fat Korean bloke?” To which the reply came back: “Neither. It was David Warner.”

- Martin Johnson

It has become something of a tradition for a game of cricket between a couple of colonial cousins to generate the kind of rhetoric that would, in other circumstances, prompt emergency meetings of the United Nations Security Council. All for a terracotta urn less than six inches high, containing the charred remains of a couple of bails. Not exactly worth going to war over.

And yet, in a build-up as ludicrously drawn out as Christmas, it appears to be written into the terms of contract that the two protagonists start the ball rolling with exchanges of the “ya boo, sucks to you” variety commonly found in primary school playgrounds.

Australia, as hosts, were afforded the honour of firing the first verbal shot ahead of the upcoming series, and not for the first time, their chosen spokesman was Warner. A cricketer who has confirmed, on more than one occasion, the old link between noise and empty vessels.

If there is a distinction between the two sides when it comes to the propaganda stuff, you’d have to say that England are a bit more subtle about it. As is the case this time with Jonathan Agnew, the BBC’s cricket correspondent, going for the reverse psychology approach by describing Joe Root’s boys as one of the worst ever England sides to travel to Australia.