A series too far If Buttler is laughing off a hammering by Australia it suggests fixture overkill

If you were listening carefully you might just have learned the answer to an ancient riddle in Melbourne, where Australia finished off their whitewash of England in the Contractual Obligation ODI series on Tuesday.

- Andy Bull

They won the third game by 221 runs, the largest ODI defeat in England's history. A record, then, and not the game's only one. There were 10,406 paying spectators in the ground, the smallest recorded audience for an Australian one-day game at the MCG.

It turns out a team falling down when there's no one around to hear it does still make a sound and it's something like Jos Buttler's maudlin after-match interview. "I'm not fussed at all about the results, to be honest," he said.

The old joke is that the English, not being a spiritual people, invented cricket to give themselves an idea of eternity. Buttler looked and sounded like a man who had been condemned to spend a thousand years in purgatory. He could easily have tried to disguise his disdain for the game, but he seemed too weary to conjure up the usual platitudes. "The landscape of cricket has changed dramatically over the last few years, we're in a different time," he said, "Lots of people are talking about how to keep bilateral cricket relevant and this is a good example of how not to do it."