Cricket has a pitiless sense of humour. The most prolific opener in county cricket tiptoed into Lord’s last week in a state of deepening unease. For the first time in over half a decade, Rory Burns had found himself short of summer runs. Here, on the one hand, was the culmination of a singular and in many ways inspiring career. A maiden home Test match, at the Home Of. But it would be taking place on a “substandard” greenish one, and a week before an Ashes series, and with his game in a rut. He needed runs. Instead, the No.11 got them.

Burns made 6 and 6, from 25 and 26 balls, with no boundaries. He was caught behind on both occasions, once playing with an angled bat to mid-on, and then, in the second innings, the bat flapping madly, the feet stuck in peat, defending pointlessly to extra cover. And it didn’t stop there. It never does.

In a further twist of the knife, Burns’ unravelling in the second dig was made all the more harrowing by the chirpiness elicited by Jack Leach at the other end; as Burns searched high and low for an outlet of any kind, a four-ball, an inside edge for three, anything, every Leachian squeeze behind square or bunt through mid-wicket served up another reminder of the game’s cruel sense of the absurd. The jokes were obvious, and relentlessly made. One batted with nothing to lose. The other with his world on the line. There was a further irony that Burns faced bowlers at Lord’s who he deals with every week on the circuit. He was undone not by alien talents, but wearily familiar ones.

A little before his home debut, Burns told me that his game was “not far off” – by which he meant that it wasn’t quite there either. It so happened that we were talking just as Jason Roy was going bananas against Australia in a World Cup semi-final. There we were, discussing the cuts and thrusts of the county treadmill, the essential value of “staying philosophical” as an English opener, and his frustrations at having yet to nail the big statement score in Test cricket, while on the telly, in another sphere, his best mate was batting like a Marvel spin-off. The irony was not hard to detect.

Burns’ self-made story should be one to celebrate. A batsman who’s found his own way to the top. A run-maker of immense consistency and a homegrown Championship-winning captain.

He thinks hard about the game, and his own. The way he bats is testament to that. He’s the kind of player you root for. But in a results business, runs are the only currency in town, and Burns is currently panning for pennies. His international career hinges on next week.