England’s MCG win is a real coup – and a picture of what could have been | Barney Ronay

Na-na na-na na-na na na, Duckett is pissing. On the piss. Duckett is taking a piss.

Don’t take me home, please don’t take me home. And while we’re here, stand up, stand up, please stand up if you like a two-day test on a field as green and ridged as an under-ripe roasting potato. By mid-afternoon on day two, MCG England’s top order finally did something. The bells stopped. Dogs meowed. Birds flew backwards through the air. And Test cricket turned into darts.

This probably always came in some form or another. The universe tends towards entropy. In the end, in England it’s all shirtless men singing Sweet Caroline. As England’s openers chased 175 to win this fourth Test midway through a strange, restless day of fast-forward cricket, junk cricket, drug-free cricket, there was a sense of barriers dissolving, of a top order wanting not just to play the old favourites, but to play them all at the same time.

Ben Duckett kicked things off with three fresh air moves in his first five balls. He knocked Mitchell Starc off his pads. He twirled his bat like a club. He was almost bowled, almost caught and almost caught and bowled.

Absurd running ramps were attempted. A forward defense drew a huge pantomime roar from the banks of the England fans. Zak Crawley stood still and hit Michael Neser’s seventh ball high for six minutes, a beautiful moment of clarity amid all that heat and noise.

The opening partnership reached fifty after 6.5 overs. Duckett walked away soon afterwards with 34 off 26, playing something of a defensive bunt in the cave, but also having certainly produced one of the strangest active, top-class Test innings in the history of this ground.

And there was more as Brydon Carse walked away at number 3 with over a hundred runs still needed for victory. Ideally, Carse would have raised his left elbow to the sky at this point and blasted his way to 27 off 117 balls, truly sticking him to the man, panicking the squares and undermining the dominant paradigm. He didn’t do this. Instead, he played every cricket shot imaginable, pure movement, unchoreographed shapes, free-flowing physical ballet, on his way to a terrible six.

There was a vague sense of desecration about all this. Australia reveres Test cricket. This is important here. It speaks of the land, the culture, the triumphant separation from the colonial past. In Adelaide they are concerned about letting you in through the media entrance without a collar. In Melbourne, the G at Christmas is a secular cathedral, a temple of chinos and blue twill shirts, a permanent cultural focal point.

Except Duckett is now playing meth ball. Carse went out to stock up on chaps. Brendon McCullum leans so far back in his chair, feet up, that he threatens to disappear into a ball of pure human insolence.

And as England walked away to tea, 77 to two and went on at six and a half, the ghost of something long declared dead on the table, the Bazball who dared not speak his name, had never felt so terribly alive. Albeit, living alone in a dehydrated way, leathery and Botoxed, pumped full of drugs, and telling everyone it has never felt so young.

This was no justification for anything. But it was a sign of grace, a check mark against all that. The English approach to batting made perfect sense here. A successful chase and a four-wicket win reminded us of the basic logic of playing this way on a pitch that kept sewing.

And at this point there are two things worth saying about it. Firstly, any England team that wins a Test in Australia is real. On day two here, England bowled Australia out trailing by 132 per bowler, then pulled off an excellent attack around the park on a difficult delivery. In doing so, they secured a first Test victory since Sydney in 2011. This is a place of destruction, collapse, trauma and careers turned around. Whatever the outcome of the series, this is a real achievement and a sign for the regime.

But let’s also be clear: it is in no way a justification for another losing tour, or for a failing board. In fact, this is the opposite. What winning in Melbourne says is: this is what you could have gotten. Here is evidence that Australia was vulnerable, and for good reason. They came into this game missing three all-time bowlers. Mitch Starc has had to play every Test. The at bat isn’t really there. This team was vulnerable.

But England just wasn’t ready to press his fingers into those tender points. They started out in Perth playing jet-lagged cricket, wide-eyed, still trying to figure out what day it was. A well-prepared, balanced and armed team might be able to do more than just take a dead rubber on a shaky field.

Instead, a talented, biddable, somewhat raw group of players has sometimes been betrayed by shortcuts and poor planning. A backroom energy that was initially inspiring, and whose spirit flared up again here during that chase, has not known how to transform an idea and a set of slogans into a winning machine. Or at least not yet, anyway.

The victory here will stand alone. But it should also serve as a rebuke, a sign of internal frustration about complacency, indolence, and how easy it is to miss these opportunities.

England will now also have a fair chance of winning in Sydney and chasing this series all the way to the hypothetical finish line. They’ve turned cricket into darts here. Finally they did what they always promised. But who knows what the southern summer would be like now if they had started running a little earlier.