It didn't matter that they'd hammered out a miracle, rewritten history and lifted their nation. Two Sundays ago, the English cricket captain, Joe Root, was clear: "We still have to be in (by) 12". There were still matches to be played this summer and rules to be followed.

You can sneer at grown men being imprisoned by a teenager's curfew, but so much of greatness is born of athletes accepting a doctrine or swearing by a routine. Aristotle's dribbling prowess is unrecorded but the Greek once wisely noted: "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit."