On days like this, on tours like these, comes the dark humour. After Ben Duckett was consumed second ball by Pat Cummins, to conclude another thin match for him, and for an opening combination on which so many hopes rested, it was, noted one wag, England’s third-longest opening partnership of the series. Eight balls only, but the third-longest nonetheless.

After a good morning for England, when they hoovered up the final six wickets in quick time and when Ben Stokes quashed fears of an overnight injury by bowling seven overs at the start of the day, Duckett and Zak Crawley walked out with the aim of getting through the final ten minutes of play before lunch. In truth, not an exacting challenge, the quality of the new-ball attack notwithstanding.

For once, Mitchell Starc’s first over was uneventful, save one miss from Crawley. To Cummins, Duckett dispatched a loosener to the mid-wicket boundary first ball but was then drawn into a half-shot — a non-shot, really, but not a leave, obviously — with an angled bat to his second. Marnus Labuschagne, who was to take the catch of the series soon afterwards off Ollie Pope, made no mistake with this simple chance.

Perhaps nobody embodies the emasculation of this England team on this tour, and the emasculation of the philosophy that has underpinned their challenge, more than Duckett: the unorthodox, rasping opener who prides himself on how few balls he leaves at the top of the order, but who departed the crease practising his leave, and who, when it mattered, played a nothing shot, full of lack of conviction.

As he waited for Cummins’s first over, it would have been fascinating to know Duckett’s mind. Play or leave? Attack or defend? As he wandered back to the pavilion, he actually shadowed a leave, an acknowledgement, perhaps, of what he should have done. But changing a habit is so hard under pressure, and his bat was drawn magnetically to the ball, half-heartedly. He hung it out there, edged and was gone.

There have always been aggressive openers in Test cricket, but none who have left the ball so infrequently, perhaps, or for whom the renunciation of the leave has become such a part of their identity. In the first innings, the Barmy Army emitted a roar when Duckett let one go in Starc’s first over, simply because it has become such a collector’s item. In any series, you can count the number of Duckett leaves on the fingers of two hands.

“I didn’t believe I could play Test cricket because I didn’t leave the ball that much,” he once said. “It was Baz [McCullum] who said: ‘why do you have to go out and bat like these previous openers. Why can’t you be the best version of yourself?’” And, boy, did it work after McCullum brought him back to the top of the order in place of Alex Lees. A torrent of runs at a serious lick; the very personification of Bazball.

Duckett has played some the best innings of the Bazball era, scoring scintillating hundreds in Rawalpindi, Rajkot, Multan and Leeds; cutting and carving the quicks; sweeping and reverse-sweeping the spinners; impish, quick-footed and doing it all with a smile; starting a line in bucket hats, Duckett Buckets, and playing fast and loose with the lingo. How many can we chase? How many have you got?

But could it work in Australia, we wondered? With the hard pitches; the extra bounce; the immaculate lines; the array of slip fielders, straining at the leash? The pressure. If Duckett went well, perhaps the whole unorthodox project — the lack of warm-up matches, the mid-series break, the gung-ho batting — would be able to withstand the ferociousness and the relentlessness of the Australian cricketing machine.

Sad to report, it has not worked. Duckett has yet to reach 30 in the series, though he has attracted some good balls along the way and, with a strike rate in the 80s, has tried to stay true to his instincts. He has nicked off three times to the cordon and Pope, at number three, has been called to the middle as early as the ninth over in each Test of the series. An opening partnership that has fired the team off to so many impressive starts has mis-fired.

It hasn’t worked, for him or for the batting unit as whole. The extra bounce and the accuracy and skill of the Australian seam bowling unit has won the day. Joe Root has scored the only hundred. And here in Adelaide, the pre-match message from Stokes was to fight and scrap and show some mongrel. He wanted some old-school resistance, in other words, a telling repudiation of all that had gone before.

As a top-class multi-format player, Duckett’s calendar takes some careful managing, but his returns fell away after a gruelling five-Test series against India in the summer. He ought to have been rested for the Hundred, but chose to play (because, frankly, who wouldn’t, given the chance to earn so much for slogging so few?) during which the runs dried up and didn’t return in the white-ball games against South Africa and New Zealand. He came into this Ashes on the back of precious little meaningful cricket or form, like the team as a whole.

And so, as Duckett walked off, practising his leave, Pope arrived, playing for his place. After Pope got off the mark, Crawley got through to lunch with a bit of old-school time-wasting thrown in. Before the final ball of the over, he did some gardening, to run the clock down; Cummins responded by taking the piss and bending down to do his shoe-laces; Cummins ran in; Crawley backed away to run down the clock some more. One wag noted that the only thing England have been competitive at, is time-wasting. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.