There’s a word missing from the English language. The nauseating, riveting, unbearable feeling one gets from watching those passages of play in any number of sports where your team, your player, or your country is engaged in a battle of such enormous proportions.

It is entertainment and pain mixed together in a cocktail of horrific splendour. At 11pm AEST, on an otherwise quiet winter Sunday, thousands of Australian fans were experiencing a collective moment of this.

Flashbacks to 2019 began around 11:30pm, those of us who had chosen to embark on the 3am odyssey back in those halcyon days pre-Covid, remember all too well the image of our TVs and minds fracturing under the titanic power of Ben Stokes.

The fact that he came so close, in a chase far more unlikely against an Australian team far more settled than they were that afternoon in Leeds, is tremendous, even if that won’t be the way this match will be remembered.

Where to start with this match. Somehow, against all reason and probability, the second Test at Lords has eclipsed the miraculous match at Edgbaston in terms of sheer drama and theatre.

A sedate and languid opening three days burst into something completely other-worldly; crickets own Cambrian explosion based entirely in North London.

Over the course of Saturday and Sunday, test cricket witnessed its life cycle accelerate, reverse, promptly perish and rise out of the dust kicked up by Stuart Broad’s jittery dance moves on the crease as the spectacle turned momentarily, into a farcical game of cat and mouse.

It started, really, with the long build-up between Pat Cummins’ helmet-and-bat-less charge across Birmingham and Stokes winning the toss at the now somewhat ironically named ‘Home of Cricket’.

It started with Zak Crawley blithely claiming that England’s winning margin would be in the comfortable zone of 150 runs. It is still unclear whether he was actually venturing a guess as to Stokes’ fourth innings total or not.

Before a ball had been bowled down the slope, the English PR team had set about reversing the narrative of losing = bad, and claimed they were doing something rather more important here, saving Test cricket itself.

Whether or not Test cricket had asked to be saved, here we were about to get a good old dollop of rescue remedy. Here are grey clouds rolling over as the Australian openers wander out to bat, casually thinking to themselves that some past transgression must be rearing its head for the batting conditions to so continually be against them.

Strap yourselves in, Joe Root had calmly extolled, Round 2 was about to be punchier, more entertaining, laden with more adjectives than the Long Room at Lords. How right he was, in entirely the wrong way.

It turns out, however, that as entertaining as this new English side can be on their day, precious little beats watching the batsman with the highest Test average since Sir Donald Bradman collate a century of near perfection, as Steve Smith did over the first two days.

His trademark cover drives, serene flicks to the leg side and constant movement that threatened to turn himself into a kind of perpetual-motion device is not new to Lords, or England. But with Australia looking to set up a second win with a big total after being sent in to bat, it was sheer class.

England’s first innings began oh so brightly, and not just thanks to the clear skies that seemed to part for them as soon as they had cleaned up Australia’s tail.

The top-order clawed and scraped their way into a potentially commanding position, reaching 188/1 before their die-before-changing approach to the short ball claimed Duckett, Pope and Root within the space of an hour.

Batters that are far better than the shots they fell to, which happens in Test cricket, but need not happen to three batters in a row when the lead was there for the taking.

As it happened, the bodyline tactic worked to stymie the English advance, and there were audible sounds of lip smacking from the home balcony as England plotted and schemed, their mission of entertainment temporarily halted as they pushed for a win.

Trailing by 91, England didn’t turn to the short ball immediately. It was traditional bowling at first. Good length balls, top-of-off stuff, slips in place.

Lunch comes on Day 4, Smith and Khawaja in control, the lead building steadily with a hefty chunk of the game remaining. Suddenly, something switches.

Content with repeating Australia’s short ball tactic but pushing it to a degree so extreme that the middle of the Lords pitch may need a few sessions with a chiropractor, Broad, Robinson, Tongue, Anderson and Stokes launched an unprecedented assault of bouncers that not only rattled the Australian batters but also the umpires, who failed in their duty to ensure only two head-high balls were bowled an over.

There is negative bowling, and then there was this. In the afternoon session, 98 percent of all balls sent down by the English seamers were recorded as short.

Not surprisingly, a record since ball-by-ball records have been kept. But the umpires didn’t intervene. 7 wides and 6 no-balls were called across the innings as the Australians fell to the same trap that snared the English top order.

It was a dusty stalemate. Tougher to watch than a rain delay and as predictable as Brendon McCullum’s crossed legs. If this is test cricket being rescued, don’t grab the life raft.

Tea comes and the pendulum swings yet again, as it so often does. But for the next day and a half, the pendulum would swing so far, to the point that Lords put the Hollies Stand to shame with scenes uncharacteristic and unbefitting the Marks & Spencer blazers and ties stained with beer.

Finally getting the cloud cover they’d wished for all game, Starc and Cummins helped themselves to a delicious serving of English batters at the top of the final innings; Starc producing a trademark yorker which snuck devilishly around Ollie Pope’s legs, before Cummins cleaned up Root and Brook in the same over.

Brook’s dismissal literally unplayable, and an almost exact replica of what he did to Joe Root at Old Trafford four years ago.

England are 4/40. A perilous position to be in a chase of 371. Surely there’s no chance of this, is there? Cameron Green, suspiciously quiet all game, sends a bouncer at the head of Duckett, who dutifully swipes at it and is caught by Starc at third man.

The no-ball is checked late, Duckett waits. Fair delivery, he walks. But Stokes waves him back, the umpires have heard through their earpieces that in fact, the catch wasn’t a catch, as the ground has inexplicably controlled the ball better than Starc has.

By the letter of the law, yes, it wasn’t a dismissal, however that must mean that hundreds, if not thousands of catches over the years can now be considered invalid.

The fact that Starc controlled the ball for longer than many do when they instantaneously throw the ball into the air does not apply here. The turf had an indelible effect on Starc’s grip, and his fingers were on the wrong side of the Dukes. No matter, a day of Ashes cricket isn’t complete without a controversial catch.

Then Day 5 comes, Lords is full again because everyone knows that with Stokes at the crease, this chase has got a hell of a lot of life left in it. Captain and Opener start smartly, negotiating the tricky morning and putting away the bad balls.

Proper Test cricket. All is well. Duckett miscues another hook shot and Carey, who is about to become the centre of the cricketing world, grasps a one-handed catch.

Australia have the breakthrough, and Bairstow walks out to the middle.

The final two hours at Lords will go down in the history books as two of the most beguiling hours of cricket the world has ever seen. The English team promised entertainment, and by Johnny did it deliver.

A quick flashback however, to just 24 hours prior. Marnus Labuschagne misses a short ball. Johnny Bairstow spies a chance and underarms the ball at the stumps in one swift, perfectly legal action. It’s called a stumping, and it doesn’t matter how far away you are from the stumps.

He misses, and Labuschagne holds his ground anyway. Fast forward to Day 5, and Bairstow leaves a short ball of his own, errantly scratches his mark in the crease, and wanders off to chat to Ben Stokes, presumably asking him when it’s cool to start slogging the ball.

Carey throws down the stumps and catches Bairstow somewhere between the crease and the pavilion. Hands are raised, voices are raised and suddenly one finger is raised. You could have framed Bairstow’s expression towards the Australian huddle and used it to explain the emotion of ‘pure hate’.

Lords erupts. The stands turn into a seething, broiling beast that is so rarely heard this far South in the UK. ‘Same old Aussies, always cheating’ rings out relentlessly.

Broad arrives with his trademark lanky frame and inexplicably small pads, and sets about reminding the Aussies of words like ‘spirit’ and ‘game’. Stuart Broad is of course, a famous spirit-of-the-game player. But all this energy sparks Ben Stokes. He is a man who runs not on carbs or Powerade or financial goals but on pure emotion and high-stakes.

He seemed to be waiting for the moment, and there it came on a silver platter, before lunch no less. In the overs before the break he plunders six after six off the unfathomable bowling of the Australians, who gleefully pop balls into his arc and watch the result sail off into a crowd that has now mutated into one giant, roaring organism.

But the coup de grâce arrives as the players head in for lunch, walking through the esteemed Long Room, laden with oil paintings and wooden placards and men from a different era, who shame themselves and their country by absorbing the raucous energy from outside and channeling it into something far more personal to the players standing a rulers length away.

The stewards try their best to halt it, but the size of the egos and the breadth of entitlement emanating through the room is too much for a handful of underpaid guards to manage. All of this in front of cameras, no less.

Play resumes and Stokes belts a few more boundaries. Cheers and boos are dolled out in equal measure but a pallor has been cast on proceedings. Stokes eventually miscues one, and Australia’s entire plan of waiting for him to fail finally eventuates. There will be no repeat of Headingley.

There will be no afternoon spent rewatching their failings under the unflinching eyes of Justin Langer. Mitchell Starc’s raised arm and Josh Tongue’s fallen stump are the final pieces of this confusing, patchwork puzzle of a test match we’ve just witnessed.

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No doubt this renewal of animosities will find a source of encouragement in Leeds. Headingly is far more boisterous than Lords, and you would be fool to think the crowd there won’t let the Australians know what they think of the umpires interpretation of the rules.

England need a miracle, something akin to a Ben Stokes innings, played out over five days in three straight matches if they want the urn to come back to their shores.

For Australia, a shot at history is tantalisingly close. This will be the last time Warner, Smith, Khawaja and possibly Hazelwood, Starc and Lyon play an Ashes series in England, and its difficult to imagine a team this good arriving at Heathrow in 2027.

The next Test is so soon that there’s barely time for Australian supporters to catch up on sleep before the wheel begins to grind again. We were promised entertainment, we just didn’t know it would be like this.