The Ashes 2023: England's comeback hopes end in cruel fashion - Felix White

Felix White is a musician, author and co-host of the BBC's Tailenders podcast.

In his fifth column for BBC Sport this summer, he discusses the disappointment of seeing England's hopes of winning the Ashes washed away by the Old Trafford rain in the fourth Test.

The worst part was, it didn't even really hurt. It was just sad.

As we were all left to either stare into the deepening puddles on the outfield at Old Trafford or watch and listen to Ashes best ofs on the final day of the fourth Test, England's hopes of winning the men's Ashes for the first time in eight years dissipated into the grey, nuclear air.

There was something cruel about the re-runs through a Sunday we had all chalked off to watch England make it all square.

In those re-runs, there were blue skies aplenty, Stuart Broad bowling spells from more than a decade ago, bounding packages laced with the comfort of knowing the (favourable) outcomes of the handpicked moments.

Whacked up to fill time in semi-consolation, it all acted as a kind of handbrake reflection point in which to counter-balance (almost) four Tests of over-stimulated cricket that have spun out in front of us in just over a month.

The cruellest part - of course - is that England really dominated here, turning all the micro see-sawing that had previously imprinted itself into this series into a macro trajectory in their favour.

In hindsight, it was all maybe laced with a bit of tragedy. We were all lured in far too willingly for it to be anything but, lots of resolutions being neatly tied into what could be nothing but a series-levelling win.

A revenge on 2019's anti-climactic humbling here that gave Australia the urn. Tick.

Opener Zak Crawley's 189 that, in the face of near-constant criticism, the English inner sanctum had made clear he would eventually produce. Tick.

Moeen Ali, promoted to three of his own free will, accompanying Crawley for periods with shots that most of us would happily trade 10 years of life just to experience playing once. Tick.

Jonny Bairstow rediscovering the brutal ball striking of last year, running byes straight to Alex Carey who repeatedly - outrageously - missed under-arm throws to the striker's end that would have mirrored the Lord's stumping. Tick.

As England neared 600, reducing Australia to a meagre, thoughtless weariness, it kicked the kind of energy into Old Trafford that we have grown moreish of over the past year; a spectacle that reduces you to giggling and near-combustion.

We should have known then, when Bairstow departed 99 not out, wielding his bat at the media centre as if it was one singular villain from his past who he had returned to finally slay, there was some poetic injustice still to come. Something just didn't add up.

"Is it the wettest place in Europe? I think it might be," Mancunian songwriter Johnny Bramwell of I Am Kloot said of the city some years ago.

"As I was learning to play the guitar, I was sat in my room with the rain coming in against the window. It was atmospheric. There is a kind of melancholy uplift to a lot of the music from Manchester and I think the rain has got something to do with it."

Bramwell, of course, could not have been further from talking about cricket, but something about it was called to mind as the England squad played football on the outfield on day five in the same city, forcing smiles as they were drenched.

What Bramwell didn't mention is, along with the melancholic uplift, his songs too are, almost without exception, about disaster.

Melancholic uplift and disaster. It is about as close a way to sum up this Test being washed out as you could find.

Ironically, It is the only game of the four Tests so far that actually couldn't have gone either way at any stage.

As the Australians looked on sheepishly through the rain on Sunday, caps with 'Dettol' on shadowing their eyes, you sensed that even for them this was a little bit deflating.

They had come too with a vague collective notion of saving Test cricket projected on them before the implosions and ever-ticking mood shifts, damning reports on discrimination in cricket and that final, strange, moralistic red herring of a day at Lord's made us all forget anything meant anything, other than who was leaving with that tiny little thing supposedly filled with ashes.

At Old Trafford the walk from the dressing rooms to the outfield, down spiral stairs, exposes the players to the concourse areas where crowds gather as they descend.

When they did after lunch on day three, Jonny Bairstow and Stuart Broad on one side and the Australians on the other, they were all shouted at from the throng.

The Australians, downtrodden but glistening via a quirk of the light, half-smiled with the body language of men learning to make themselves as small as possible. Bairstow, meanwhile, turned around to something that was said and appeared to ask what was shouted at him.

We all knew the rain was coming then, we just didn't know how much. Neither players nor crowd knew how close England would get.

Now it has washed away hope of a historic comeback, we will have to make do with a final Test at The Oval with a series draw still up for grabs.

As brilliant as it's all been (and it has been), you couldn't help but sense in that tiny moment away from the cameras, the players in the nowhere land between pitch and dressing room, that we will all feel the same soon too.

Very soon, Ashes over, we will all be in our own little state of nowhere lands, not sure what to do with ourselves, uncertain whether we are bereft or relieved that it's all over, whether to gesture back into all the noise or go into hiding.

It has, after all, been a lot for everyone.