Anyone for the Ashes? Not yet …

Before last Sunday, whenever a coach appeared on the school playground trying to get children to take cricket seriously, the kids looked as if they would rather be in maths class.

Sunday Times

TELFORD VICE in London

AND now for the Ashes. It was only days ago that the game New Zealand couldn’t fairly be said to have lost but that somehow still made England the men’s World Cup champions electrified Lord’s, along with legions beyond the boundary.

How have the Kiwis responded? By naming Ben Stokes, England’s matchwinner, among the nominees for the “New Zealander of the Year” award.

Cameron Bennett, the chief judge, explained that Stokes “might not have been playing for the Black Caps but, having been born in Christchurch [and lived there until he was 12] where his parents now live and with Maori ancestry, there’s clearly a few Kiwis about who think we can still claim him”.

That happened five days after the final. Clearly, memories of the World Cup final are going nowhere slowly.

But, at Edgbaston on August 1 — just 18 days after that craziness — England and Australia will start what for some remains the real thing.

The old-fashioned kind of cricket person will consider the World Cup only the starter of an English summer whose main course is, and always will be, the clash of international cricket’s most ancient enemies in whites, using a red ball, for five days at a time, and with nary a power play nor a meanly called leg-side wide in sight.

Too soon? Are we supposed to move on from Lord’s so quickly?

The moment certainly hasn’t passed at Hague School in Bethnal Green, deep in London’s east end.

Before last Sunday, whenever a coach appeared on the playground trying to get children to take cricket seriously, the kids looked as if they would rather be in maths class.

Hold the ball how? Put your feet where? Do everything side-on? Why? Learning cricket’s secret handshakes wasn’t much fun.

But, last week, a new energy had taken over that had nothing to do with coaching or even cricket itself. Front feet splayed galore, the ball was thrown far more often than it was bowled, catches were rarely taken, and the coach’s only function was to carry equipment.

Unlike in other weeks, when cricket had to compete with sports like badminton and basketball — and, of course, football — for its place on this playground, the game of choice was, almost all of the time, been cricket.

That has less to do with cricket than it does with the drama of what happened at Lord’s. Which brings us back to the Ashes. Test cricket is all about drama. Or, if you like, quality. The white-ball stuff, by contrast, is about quantity.

But England will look to keep the flame of the World Cup drama alive when they play Ireland in a four-day test at Lord’s that starts on Wednesday.

“I don’t think I'm alone in saying that it’s probably the greatest cricket match ever, and for that to be the World Cup final was incredible,” Sam Curran told reporters.

“That will provide a buzz for everyone across English cricket going into the Ashes, which is the biggest series an England player can be involved in in tests, and this match against Ireland.

“Days like Sunday get everyone, whether they were involved or not, more excited and desperate to do well. So I'm sure it will rub off as we head into the test part of the summer.”

Note the qualification — the Ashes is only “the biggest series an England player can be involved in in tests”.

That’s what happens when a team wins the World Cup. Nothing else matters nearly as much. And who can blame the English: imagine what that triumph would do for cricket in South Africa.

How long will the new order of things last? Had England not won last Sunday, only until the first ball is bowled at Edgbaston on August 1.

Now? Who can say.