Please tell me my lucky cup made the difference in the Ashes

Where should you have been on Tuesday morning to ensure England didn’t lose a wicket during the final session of the fourth Test? The Adelaide Oval car park of course, at least according to fast bowler James Anderson.

As heart rates steadied, the clock hands rattled safely past 11am and close of play called, Anderson told Test Match Special that he had coped with the pressure by hot-footing it down to study the number plates of the parked cars.

He had no shame, and nor should he. He’s just like the rest of us.

But Anderson doesn’t know how lucky he is. As a player, he has power. Perhaps this morning will dawn to his unlikely glory, an unbeaten 50 for the newly crowned Burnley Lara under the havocinducing Adelaide floodlights.

For the rest of us, the listener, the television viewer or the spectator, life lived on the edge of sporting success is far more intolerable.

Our impotence is crushing. We care, too much, but there is nothing to be done except to fall back on superstition, the ancient patron saint of lost causes.

God, should you care to consult him, has better things to do. The only possible answer is to continue doing whatever you last were doing, when things were going well.

This might mean securing a long tenure on the sofa or it might mean squatting behind the chair. It might mean watching television with the radio on, or listening to the radio with the television banished.

Or hiding in the loo. Or drinking from a lucky cup, or talking, not talking and whatever you do, do NOT touch the remote… Too late! You fool!

Up in the TMS box, Phil Tufnell and Alison Mitchell decided that the runes said they should stand up, but 10 minutes before the end of the day Dawid Malan was out, bowled by an 89mph delivery from Pat Cummins, the special pink day-night ball nipping between bat and pad to send a single bail flying from the stumps.

Had they sat down? We should be told.

The curse of superstition affects sports fans, everywhere. The rugby spectator who salutes the lone magpie on the way to the game with a lossprotecting “Hello captain”. The football supporter whose lucky pants should have been consigned to history long ago. The Ceefax addict back in the infancy of the internet, who was unable to leave the screen as VVS Laxman and Rahul Dravid knocked up the numbers against Australia at Kolkata in 2001.

And way back at The Oval Test of 1882, where the Ashes began, fear gripped Victorian spectators just the same. As “The Demon” Spofforth bowled England out for 77, one poor man dropped dead from the sheer damn tension of the occasion.

Another, as Australia inched towards their seven run victory, slowly gnawed at the top of his umbrella – perhaps convinced that mouthfuls of oiled silk would save the day.

By the time you read this, you will probably know whether the collective superstition of the country’s cricket fans did any good. Whether Michael Vaughan giving England a three out of 10 chance of victory was a foolish jinx. Whether England managed to stagger to a record-breaking 354. Whether James Anderson was ever able to return to the dressing room.

Defeat? Hah, an old friend.

It is, as ever, hope that is so difficult to take.