There’s a lot of good things about England, but I don’t want to tell you too many of them.

The captains of England and Australia can barely exchange pleasantries these days without a body-language expert immediately declaiming on the angle of their handshakes.

I guess we speak pretty loosely, don’t we, about looking forward to the Ashes and all that—and we are, but it’s not with both eyes. We’ve got one eye on that and one eye on...