Instead, participants and watchers collude in a shared denial of luck. Sometimes it's an agreement to believe in the fictitious "law of averages", that luck "balances out". Or it's Gary Player's "The more I practise, the luckier I get", a guiding principle for generations of sportspeople despite being pure tosh.

Some analysis of luck reveals the unspeakable truth about the Ashes. Why were the results so schizophrenic? Because luck doesn't have a stable personality. Why did the first mornings of the matches play out so divergently? They didn't. Why did Australia lose? They were unluckier than England. (But no, we're not letting them off lightly just yet.)

The benchmark, it goes without saying, is those 18.3 overs Australia faced on the first morning at Trent Bridge. Instead of looking at the 10 wickets or the 60 runs, let's tote up how many batting errors they made: how many plays and misses, how many edges, how many times the ball hit the bat while the batsman was trying to pull away. Australia made 30 batting errors that morning. Every third error, a wicket fell.

How did this error rate compare with other first mornings? Surely Trent Bridge was diabolical beyond belief, with Edgbaston not far behind, Cardiff not great for England, and Lord's and the Oval serene progressions of Australian batting assurance, reflective of the conditions at each venue. Again: tosh.

Contradicting the wild variation in scores, the number of batting errors in those first mornings was remarkably consistent, reflecting the difficulty of batting on the first morning of a Test match. England made 19 errors in the first 18.3 overs at Cardiff; Australia 18 at Lord's; Australia 20 at Edgbaston; and Australia 18 at the Oval. One batting error per over is a fairly common rate on first mornings, and so it was for those four Test matches.

If a batsman plays and misses, plays and nicks safely, or is caught, it's still an error each time. The difference is largely down to luck. (No matter how beautiful that Lord's wicket looked for batting, if Chris Rogers' edge in the first over through Joe Root's hands had been held, who knows where the Australian innings might have ended up?)

Australia's 30 batting errors at Trent Bridge exceeds the other matches clearly. But it is distorted by the unusual appearance of lower-order batsmen before lunch on the first day, and 18 of the 30 errors were made by the bottom four of Johnson, Starc, Lyon and Hazlewood (lucky bastards).

The statistical weirdness of Trent Bridge is emphasised by what happened to Australia's top seven. On the second ball of the ninth over, Peter Nevill was seventh man out and the score was 33. Up to that moment, Australia had made 12 batting errors. Was this a great deal worse than the other mornings? Not at all – in fact it was about the same. At the same point at Cardiff, England had made nine errors costing one wicket; at Lord's, Australia had made 10 errors costing no wickets; at Edgbaston, Australia had made 13 errors costing two wickets; and at the Oval, Australia's Rogers and Warner had made eight errors but got off scot-free.

What was unusual at Trent Bridge was that so many batsmen were out to their first error. This happened to Rogers, Smith, Warner and Voges. On first mornings throughout the series, this did not happen to one other batsman from either side. Marsh and Nevill were dismissed on their second errors at Trent Bridge. On first mornings throughout the series, this only happened two other times, to Ian Bell at Cardiff and Warner at Edgbaston. At Trent Bridge, six of the Australian top seven had something happen to them that only happened to two other batsmen in the other four Test matches combined. Hence, all out 60. It might have been poor technique, but that technique was equally in evidence in all five matches (and don't forget Root's two errors in his first two balls at Cardiff).

Now, Player would say that if they didn't commit the errors, they wouldn't be a risk of getting out. That's true, but it's not cricket. As bowlers will tell you, batsmen are always getting away with errors. On first mornings, Gary Ballance got away with six errors at Cardiff, Warner eight at Lord's and eight at the Oval, and Rogers eight at Lord's, eight at Edgbaston and 10 at the Oval. Accordingly, the king of playing and missing won Australia's man of the series award and retired at just the right time. As a top-order batsman, Rogers said, you need a bit of luck, and how right he was.

In cricket, the fall of a wicket is very often a random event. In statistics, random events are going to cluster in random ways: the first morning at Trent Bridge was one such occurrence. It wasn't the end of the world, just a high price paid for the errors that were made.

So can Darren Lehmann and his crew wipe their brows and consign it all to bad luck? Not so fast. There were still, as rueful ticket-holders will tell you, four and a half days to go. Australia were relatively unlucky at Edgbaston and Trent Bridge, and relatively lucky at Lord's and the Oval, on the first mornings. Why did they then play as if the die had been cast? Why did they then drop their bundle? (Where was England's resilience in the two London matches?) It was as if both teams decided subconsciously, after each first morning, that this wasn't going to be their lucky match, and surrendered meekly to fate; as if luck was Voldemort, and by being unable to speak its name, the players only increased its power.