#CWC19 is almost here. Look, it’s so near you can even touch it. No? Not yet? Give it time. We’ve still got a week. At least there’s been a rustling, a few posters jostling for space on tube station walls, the odd staged event popped up around the country. The TV and radio ads are getting more plays, while the pay-rolled social influencers have turned up their own dials.

And in case you didn’t hear, good news for cricket ironists everywhere that Channel 4, having signed off in 2005 with a record high of 8.4m viewers, has grabbed the rights to show highlights. Cricket, never one for unbridled love-bombing before a big tournament, has certainly had less effective build-ups.

Inside the 11 chosen venues, meanwhile, workmen unscrew local sponsors’ hoardings and pile them high on the backs of trucks. Outfields get pasted with fresh new messages, as delegations of officials scope out pitfalls for visiting heads of state. Even south London’s illustrious gasometer finds itself draped in a vast technicolour banner. And somewhere, in amongst it all, are the players: the real influencers. As we’ve been reminded every day for months, maybe years now, cricket has been afforded one shot at the big time. Failure is not really an option. Blow it, and blow the future.

No pressure then. And yet, all around Morgan’s movement, all seems disarmingly serene. The Alex Hales fallout was barely a trickle. Jofra has been embedded. No one’s busted or snapped anything. The squad announcement was greeted warmly, while all those knotty questions about destiny, legacy and burying the past have been strictly sidelined for others to kick around.

And yet when I ask friends about this tournament, I hear the same thing every time: “Oh yeah, we’ll lose in the semis. Aussies probably.” Residual English nervousness. Innate English pessimism. Unshakeable English fatalism. All present and correct. Except where it actually matters.

Interviewing Eoin Morgan for the current issue of Wisden Cricket Monthly, I was struck (again) by his aversion to lazy tropes and, yes, dim-witted questions. While he knows the weight of history hangs heavy, he refutes the idea that his team will be cowed by it. “Along with the mind there are other things. There is form, flexibility and getting guys fit. When the World Cup is going on there will be more challenges. The levels of intensity that we operate at are changing the way we approach 50-over cricket – and the way a lot of other people approach 50-over cricket. If we continue to operate at that intensity I think it will put us in a really strong position.”

I was in my first year at university, not doing much, when they last hosted one. I’d nabbed a TV off someone and stuck it in my room, watching the daily struggle via a crackly aerial. From memory, whenever the box worked, Gavin Hamilton was scoring runs for Scotland and England were batting too slowly. It was almost certainly grim fare.

Still, I distinctly remember a steady stream of folks coming in and out to check on things, with a core of new devotees hanging around for what seemed like days on end. After all, the event (dreary, drizzly, averagely attended) was still a World Cup. It was a part of the rhythm of things. It cut through. It mattered. What cricket would give for some of that cut-through now.