THE venues for this year's Ashes series may help explain its extraordinary result.
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In contrast to the last series on English (and Welsh) soil, which featured matches in Manchester and Chester-le-Street, this version has completely spurned anything that even threatens to be deemed northern.
This is despite the presence of northerners like James Anderson (born Burnley, plays for Lancashire), Joe Root (born Sheffield, plays for Yorkshire), Adam Lyth (born Whitby, plays for Yorkshire), Mark Wood (born Ashington, plays for Durham) and Ben Stokes (who plays for Durham but couldn't actually have been born much further south than Christchurch, New Zealand).
And yet the series has travelled no further north than Stuart Broad's birthplace Nottingham.
Instead the venues, which also included Cardiff, Birmingham and the traditional London pair of Lord's and The Oval, form a particular geometrical shape which may hold the answer to some mysterious missing mojos.
Neatly framed by the M1, M4 and M5 motorways is an unmistakably distinct triangle in which, much like its better-publicised Bermuda sibling, things have been known to vanish.
Players from both nations have fluctuated between acceptability and anonymity to somehow conjure up a result that defies logic.
However, while it is planes and ships in Bermuda, across the heart of the UK it is cricketing ability and reputations.
Players from both nations have fluctuated between acceptability and anonymity to somehow conjure up a result that defies logic.
How is it possible that a series that finishes as close as 3-2 can have been so not close all the way through (with apologies to my English grammar teacher Mr Stilwell)?
All five matches have been tediously one-sided, it just happens that one side has enjoyed one-sidedness one more time than the other.
Even with Sunday's rain delay, the series required just 18 of its scheduled 25 days, costing the England and Wales Cricket Board an entire week's worth of lucrative revenue.
Four of the top five leading wicket-takers, three of the top four run-scorers and the three highest individual scores all came from the losing team as England managed to win despite huge chunks of their top order making minimal contributions.
Lyth even set a new record for least number of runs by an opener in a five-Test series, trumping Victor Trumper's 1905 contribution of just 125 by 10.
Which explains why Root was the unquestionable player of the series, consistency overruling the equally indisputable individual performance of the campaign by Broad at Trent Bridge.
Predictably, the English media haven't exactly sat on the fence, showing all the subjectivity of an Ian Healy commentary stint.
"Cook's side didn't just bowl out their opponents, they dismembered them," drooled the International Express about the Trent Bridge massacre.
Providing front and back page capital-letter headlines, plus a gushing double-page spread inside, it added that Australia's first-innings batting performance was "indescribably hopeless" and the team itself "a sorry mess".
The same could be said for the loser of the other four Tests in which England and Australia shared the privilege twice each.
With Australia's two wins coming at Lord's and The Oval, the Poms could do worse than revisiting the series' geographical layout, and banning the capital altogether.