Assuming he gets the nod on Thursday morning, Ollie Pope will become England’s 687th Test cricketer. And to look at the last few, they’re getting younger. If Pope does debut at Lord’s – very possibly slipping in at No.4, where he’s never batted before in first-class cricket – then four of England’s youngest 20 Test cricketers will have made their debuts since January this year.

Pope looks set to join Mason Crane, Dom Bess and Sam Curran among 2018’s freckly intake, with Crane, who turned 21 in February, the old man of the party. (It’s churlish, perhaps, to note that all four went to fee-paying schools, but it’s hard not to notice.) Crane, you’ll vaguely recall, was lowered into Sydney’s kiln in January and bowled better than his brutish figures suggested; the others are Ed Smith’s babes.

Smith has had quite a few months. He sashayed into the top job on the back of a dazzling interview, a brain the size of Kent and a reputation for finding sexiness in stats. Less remarked upon, as he settled into the role, was this trait which we’ve since seen in abundance: a spiritedly romantic streak that evidently allows for dreamy hunches and daring gambles, crucially underpinned by just enough logic for them to hang together.

Kohli gets it. He knows this is world cricket’s glamour tie, and one sharpened by recent power shifts. Economically, of course, there’s now only one eminence; the rest are subservient, to a greater and lesser extent, to India’s fancies. But in the sporting psyche of a people and its representatives, the old orders die hard. India may be the epicentre of the here and now, but England – the ‘games master’ of the world – is where it all began.

So it’s there, this subtext, in every meeting, every summit, and every ball bowled. It’s there in the technicolour stands, heaving to the rhythms of second- and third-generation battle-cries. It’s there in the quintessential bearings of its respective captains. It’s there in these two innately conservative cricketing cultures ardently breaking out into the new world.

There are on the face of it two graver adversaries for each country. But realpolitik precludes any bilateral interplay between the Asian superpowers, while there exists in Ashes contests an uncomfortable sense of patterns having set, of deeds done, the drama displaced by a kind of weary irritation from all that over-familiarity. And so India and England, master and commander, has become world cricket’s most gripping match-up. To Lord’s, then, and more of the same.