Root is finally a wizard in Aus after Brook's Bazball scarecrow act

Former captain's hundred ennobles everyone's Ashes, but his younger teammate finds new depths to plumb

- Barney Ronay

In the end even the celebration was perfect, out there under that strange deep-blue southern sky, in the frenzy of the game-state - manic Baz energy, England’s lower order scything away death cult-style at the other end, the way even the grass seems lacquered and glazed by the lights.

So yeah. All that stuff. In the middle of this Joe Root guided the ball away through fine leg to complete his first Test hundred in Australia, then marked it with a gentle smile and a wave of the bat, no fist-punching, no monkeys off backs, no angsty and pointed messaging.

But, then if you know, you know. Imagine trying to explain to someone who hasn’t followed the story why this was not just warm, uplifting and cathartic, but quietly epic, a moment caught for ever in its own square of space and light.

A man who already had 39 hundreds in this starchy formal dance of a sport has now scored his 40th. But follow the story, the craft, the jags in the road, the pieces this thing takes out of you along the way.

And at the end of it you have one of those great self-contained sporting moments, the sense of emotional connection through all the surrounding hoopla, the way Test cricket in particular can make you feel you know someone intimately just by watching them move and work and fail and come back.

There will, of course, be plenty of banter-war stuff to be resolved on all sides now. Is Joe Root finally great? Is he Australian great? Do we have enough? Numbers. Symmetry. Completion. Men in sheds stroking their beards and sighing. At times cricket really does feel like nothing more than lists, pencil stubs, a fussicky ticking of boxes.