I was prepared for the Barmy Army.

I actually felt like I over-prepared, to be honest.

But watching cricket is a game of key moments and, when you’re too distracted by the Archbishop of Canterbury tipping a beer over your head to stop a random bloke with a Three Lions tattoo shoving a wet willy in your ear, the circumstances can get to your decision-making ability.

There’s only so much you can do when the Archbishop of Canterbury is pouring a beer on your head.Credit: Chris Hopkins

Throughout this beautifully ill-fated Ashes tour, it has seemed that the worse England’s cricketers go, the harder, louder and probably drunker the Barmy Army gets.

But sitting among them for a couple of very rare and unfortunate sessions, when the Poms can’t seem to do anything wrong, it becomes painfully clear that’s not the case – the 3500-strong army had just been warming up for Boxing Day.

By the time Cameron Green was run out, sections of the Barmy Army were already looser than a Brydon Carse pitch map, and the joy and beer spilling out into the walkways was infectious (though here’s hoping whatever was on the end of the finger shoved in my ear at that moment was not).

On the field, England have been so poor that former captain Michael Vaughan has described the current Ashes tour as “the worst I can remember in Australia”, but for Barmy Army general manager Chris Millard, it couldn’t be going any better.

“It doesn’t........

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