On the day England needed a miracle, they got the off-spin of Will Jacks and Joe Root. If anything was designed to confirm in Australian minds that the tourists are not serious about winning back the Ashes, it was the sight of two part-timers serving up a help-yourself buffet to insatiable batsmen.

Full marks for trying, lads, and nothing personal, but what were you even doing with the ball in the first place?

With Ben Stokes staying out of the attack after batting for more than five hours in crippling heat to help narrow the first-innings deficit to 85, but England insisting he was fine, it meant Root had more Test wickets than any of the bowlers on show. And this, in a series supposedly years in the planning.

He began the day with a career tally of 73, finished it with 73, and was as powerless as anyone to prevent Travis Head’s second century of the series, and fourth in six innings on his home ground. At stumps, Australia were 271 for four, and led by 356.

Optimists blathered gamely about England’s track record with big fourth-innings chases. Realists accepted what had already been clear on the second day: the Ashes are gone, and England have colluded in their disappearance.

None of this is to disparage Root or in particular Jacks, who has been asked to do a job to which he is patently unsuited. But it raises questions about what England expected once they left out their No 1 spinner Shoaib Bashir – and indeed about why his decline has been allowed to happen at all.

England arrived in Australia with a spin-bowling plan, nearly two years in the making, but they haven’t even given it a chance to work. Instead, they have put their faith in a batting all-rounder who began this game with 50 wickets from 58 first-class matches, and a No 4 batsman who has taken his Test wickets at a rate of less than one every two games.

The logic, according to spin-bowling coach Jeetan Patel, was that the top-order struggles at Perth and Brisbane necessitated greater batting depth. In other words, Bashir – who Patel insisted remains England’s first-choice spinner – has paid the price for the failure of those at the opposite end of the batting order.

This was just about an acceptable arrangement during the seam-heavy pink-ball Test in Brisbane, where Jacks’s second-innings 41 meant he joined a small group of players deemed by Stokes to be up for the fight.

But Adelaide is traditionally a breaker of bowlers’ hearts, and Stokes’s words both before and after Brisbane suggested Bashir remained at the front of the spin-bowling queue. Just as Australia recalled Nathan Lyon, who responded with the wickets of Ollie Pope and Ben Duckett in his first over, so it seemed England would, for this game at least, turn to Bashir.

‘Bash is bowing fine,’ said Patel. ‘He is where he’s supposed to be in terms of this series.’ Asked if his absence here meant he was, in fact, unselectable, Patel replied: ‘Absolutely not. We’re playing this game and we needed the extra batter after what happened in the first two Test matches. Next week we’ll assess and see what we need there.’

There was no guarantee, of course, that Bashir would have bowled any better here. But when Jacks began after tea with a wide long hop that Usman Khawaja pulled for two, then successive half-volleys both swept for four, it seemed fair to suggest he would not have bowled any worse.

Time and again, Jacks dropped short, as if the ball had suddenly been weighed down mid-air. Time and again, he drifted on to the pads. Despite spending most of the day operating to left-handers, the off-spinner’s preferred option, he looked as unthreatening as any slow bowler can have done in 141 years of Test cricket at this beautiful old ground.

‘We tried different things with Jacksy – wider, straighter, fuller, faster,’ said Patel. ‘They negated that, and looked to put him under pressure. That’s probably what you would do against a spinner of Jacksy’s nature, where it’s not his frontline skill.’

The memories of Graeme Swann’s five-for here on the last day 15 years ago, when England won by an innings shortly before the heavens opened, are fading fast. By stumps, Jacks had gone for 107 from 19 overs for the lone wicket of Khawaja, and was nursing match figures of 39–3–212–3.

‘Would we have liked Graeme Swann out there?’ said Patel. ‘Probably, but it’s a reality of where we’re at, and what we thought we needed for this game.’

One stat, supplied by CricViz, said it all. On the 1,325 occasions an England bowler has bowled at least 20 overs in a Test, Jacks’s dot-ball percentage of 48 is the lowest. What, frankly, did anyone expect?

One of England’s problems – and many would argue it’s self-inflicted – is that the over-promotion of Bashir, despite a negligible body of work in county cricket, has sent a grim message to all spinners in the domestic game.

The leading wicket-taker in division one of the last summer’s county championship was Somerset’s Jack Leach, yet he has been ditched by England for being too predictable. Another steady slow left-armer, Hampshire’s Liam Dawson, was recalled in July after an eight-year absence from Test cricket, then dropped after one game, against India at Old Trafford.

Next among spinners in the domestic game’s wicket-taking list for 2025 was Essex’s Simon Harmer, who is South African. Then comes another Essex bowler, Matt Critchley, but he is a leg-spinner, and England are allergic to them.

And so here they were in Adelaide – a venue that places an onus on seriousness and long-term planning – trying to compete with the most ruthless team in world cricket while armed with the spin-bowling equivalents of a popgun and a kazoo.

Where England’s spin-bowling plans have gone, their fast-bowling plans have followed. Jofra Archer has been superb, both with ball and bat, and is now set to play at least four matches in this series – more than many predicted in his comeback year as a Test cricketer.

Josh Tongue has had his moments in his first Test on Australian soil. He deserved better in the first innings than figures of one for 64, and used his pace and the awkwardness of his angle in the second to remove Marnus Labuschagne and Cameron Green. He looks a bowler around whom England can build an attack.

But Brydon Carse has mixed the occasional wicket-taking delivery with an alarming lack of control, bungling his lines at the start of both the first and second days, when Archer’s accuracy desperately needed support from the other end. His economy-rate in this series of five has mirrored England’s general profligacy.

It wasn’t meant to be like this. The question is, who will be held accountable? Because the answer to that cannot be as woolly as England’s answers on Bashir.