While England’s batting always gets to hog the limelight, this tour has also been lost in the bowling fade-outs

Forty-five minutes into a quietly overcast morning at the Sydney Cricket Ground, Matt Potts came into the England attack from the Randwick End, and immediately began running through his variations.

His first ball was wide and smashed through cover by Travis Head. His second ball was both short and wide and hacked over gully by Travis Head. His third ball was short and straight and smashed past midwicket by Travis Head. His fourth ball was defended with a show of furrowed caution, to loud, mocking cheers from a crowd that had begun to tuck into the day. Welcome to the treadmill, Pottsy. And yes, it’s always like this around here.

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England hit the wall on day three at the Sydney Cricket Ground, or at least the latest in a series of walls, at the end of which Jacob Bethell admitted mental and physical fatigue was understandably, playing a part. There were dropped catches and some scattergun bowling lengths as Australia batted all day to reach 518 for seven, 134 runs ahead on first innings.

“This is proper Test cricket now in terms of the graft and the stuff that you have to put in,” Bethell said afterwards. “It was a tough day, but that’s what it’s about. We’ve got to come out tomorrow, take the three wickets early and get back in again.

England’s meek concession of the series is a waste of talent and this stroke sums up the structural failure

No doubt someone, somewhere, in some fevered corner of the internet will come up with a counter view. If the universe of cricketing hot takes really is infinite, then logically there must be a feed, a page, a platform where a voice is saying, Jamie Smith and The Shot: on second thoughts.

You might think this was a bad shot, perhaps even the Worst Shot. You might think all surviving footage of the shot should be pixelated in the interests of public safety, classified as a hate crime, scrubbed from the internet under the right to forget.