The Ashes 2015: England survive curse of the Venezuelan tree frog as Joe Root secures third Test at Edgbaston

As Peter Nevill swings again and slices through gully for four again, a thin sliver of a memory flickers brilliantly and briefly through your head, like a flash of sunlight in a mirror. The year is 2005, and you are a teenager sitting in the bedroom of your student flat, watching through cold wet fingers as Brett Lee and Michael Kasprowicz carve notches into your heart. All is lost.

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Alastair Cook talked before the match about rekindling the spirit of Edgbaston 2005. What on earth was he thinking? As Nevill and Mitchell Starc hack Australia ever further into the distance – 70 ahead, 80, 90, 100 – the ghosts of the past hover ever closer. Every run feels like eight. The Australian batsmen are seeing the ball like an Elgin Marble. The English bowlers are bowling broad beans. Jimmy Anderson’s just been ruled out of Trent Bridge. The game is up. All is lost.

^{Peter Nevill put in a valiant shift, though in vain, at Edgbaston}

It is a blind spot of modern psychotherapy that it has yet to come up with a satisfactory name for the very specific angst felt by English cricket fans on the verge of beating Australia. Ashesitis. Seasonal Hyperactive Urn Disorder. Acute Adelaide Syndrome.

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There really is nothing like the experience of feeling your soul leak out from under you as Shane Warne reduces your top order to scree, or Australian tailenders render your previously impregnable position very pregnable indeed. Non-cricket fans might liken it to the sensation of irrational dread that arises when you are throwing a dinner party and convince yourself, amid the stacks of artisan bread, the large platter of antipasti, the giant bowls of salad, the vat of beef stew, the trough of mashed potato and the pig on a spit, that you have not cooked enough food.

^{Josh Hazlewood was caught by Joe Root as Ben Stokes claimed the penultimate Aussie wicket}

Yes, it is irrational. Not since about 11.05am on Wednesday have England been anything other than overwhelming favourites, and yet you know as well as anyone: this is not how cricket works. Port Elizabeth 2003 was irrational. Adelaide 2006 was irrational. Hell, even Lord’s 2015 was irrational, even if it also felt completely normal.

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You have been branded too often by the white-hot flame of Ashes cricket to be anything other than entirely wary. And yet with every twanging nerve, with every materialising bead of sweat on the brow, comes the bleak knowledge that if you are feeling apprehensive, then we need a whole new word for what Adam Lyth must be feeling right now.

Somehow, by divine grace, Australia surrender their last three wickets.

^{Josh Poysden celebrates catching Mitchell Starc to end Australia's innings}

England need an improbable 121, and the intervening minutes are like a funeral reception, where the price of entry is one morbid anecdote about a fourth-innings collapse.

If cricketers have ice baths, then this is the cricket fan’s equivalent.

One guy points out that England were bowled out for 103 at Lord’s. Another mentions that Australia failed to chase 124 at the Oval in 1997. Some clever dick says the lowest ever score at Edgbaston is 30 by South Africa in 1924, and they were not even facing Mitchell Johnson.

^{England were thumped in the second Test at Lord's}

But none of this really registers, because at the moment you are thinking about the Venezuelan tree frog you saw on a David Attenborough programme once, which can hibernate for decades on end before suddenly lurching into life and delivering a fatal bite to the neck. That frog, you tell yourself, is Australia.

England lose an early wicket. Suddenly, Mitchell Starc is bowling bananas.

^{Alastair Cook was bowled out by Mitchell Starc for just seven runs}

Johnson is slinging down fire grenades. Meanwhile, England fans in the Hollies Stand are singing the song: “He bowls to the left, he bowls to the right…” Fools! No, worse than fools – traitors! Never rile an Australian fast bowler. They never forget. They are like elephants with an inswinger.

Somehow, England are impervious to all this. Why, it is almost as if they are independently sentient beings, unmoved by your apocalyptic sense of foreboding. Joe Root swipes Lyon over mid-wicket for six, and you chide him for his audacity.

^{Mitchell Johnson cut a dejected figure as he failed to take a single wicket on day three}

Someone runs through a list of the greatest England batting collapses. It makes you feel better, not worse.

Then, all of a sudden, the scores are level and Root is clipping the ball off his pads, and even as 25,000 pairs of arms are raised aloft, you are waiting for the catch: a passing seagull, a dismissal for obstructing the field, a sudden meteor strike on the West Midlands that would at the very least require Cook to request the extra half-hour.

^{Ian Bell (left) and Joe Root celebrate England's victory in the third Test}

But no, it’s over. England are 2-1 up. The knot in your stomach loosens a little. You emerge blinking into the evening sunlight, trying not to think about Anderson’s injury, Lyth’s form, England’s habit of following a win with a defeat.

You get into your car and begin the long drive home; carefully scanning the footwell for tree frogs before you do so.