When he sauntered to retrieve an irrelevant England boundary, a corner of Lord’s gave David Warner the bird, just as Steve Smith had been jeered to and from the pavilion earlier in the day. Warner, a pantomime villain of the highest order, simply smiled the smile of an Aussie doing what he does best.
Twisting the knife into English cricket.
Australia were heading towards the semi-finals and England were heading towards the last chance saloon.
And up on the Aussie balcony, Ricky Ponting and Justin Langer sat and cackled like Statler and Waldorf.
Talk all you like about a change in culture, this is still a hard-edged and hard-faced Australian side, cussed, fiery, with a fearsome winning mentality.
They would adopt Ben Stokes but, on this evidence, not many more of their old enemy.
And this England team is supposed to be the most feared in international one-day cricket.
Australia certainly would not swap Warner and Smith for an English pair.
The miscreants did not exactly set the contest alight - that was left to Aaron Finch with his ton and Jason Behrendorff with his five wickets - but Warner’s tidy half-century in challenging conditions contributed to a century opening stand that, in the end, was about as decisive as any passage of play.
Unlike his Indian counterpart Virat Kohli, Eoin Morgan was quite happy for the home crowd to boo Warner and Smith.
Fat lot of good that did.
Instead, any hostility in the occasion appeared to get to the England captain. His painful cameo symbolised his side’s struggles.
As Morgan appeared to back away from a routine 90mph Mitchell Starc missile, Kevin Pietersen was quick on his keypad, slotting in some exclamation marks and capital letters for effect.
“Oh no, Eoin Morgan looked scared! That Is A Horror Sign!”
Pietersen later repeated his claims but it seemed a bit harsh.
Morgan was probably not scared, just intimidated by Starc’s velocity and accuracy and by the pressure that has now built on his much-vaunted team.
Inevitably, he holed out cheaply, the memories of his flat-track fireworks against the hapless Afghans short-lived to say the least.
And now he looks likes a man feeling the sort of heat inevitable when you are at the helm of a side that came into a home World Cup as favourites and as the number one ranked outfit in the world.
Not only do Morgan and Trevor Bayliss have key selection decisions to make ahead of Sunday’s game against India, the skipper has to somehow rally a team that has gone from Rolls Royce to rabble in the space of a couple of matches.
The early defeat to Pakistan looked like a blip, back-to-back reverses against the Sri Lankans and Aussies looks like a full-blown crisis.
Not that England’s ineptitude here should divert all attention away from Australia’s excellence.
Once again, they have announced themselves at a World Cup party and no amount of comedy jeering was going to distract them.
As a grinning Warner and Smith high-fived and hugged
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