Had England's Test captain and opening bowler not cracked on past 12am after the first Test, this second Test would not have been done by 12pm two Sundays later. Nothing good happened after that midnight, nor before this midday.
New Zealand's series-levelling victory by 253 runs came at 11.48am on day five, and even that felt generously late given how the hosts have been dominated throughout this match. Normally, day-five tickets at The Kia Oval are non-refundable, but even Surrey felt bad enough to return 50 per cent after Matt Henry needed just 10.1 overs of play to clear the final five wickets.
After England won a crapshoot at Lord's, New Zealand have returned serve with a mature game-plan on a good Test pitch, against a half-and-half assortment of regulars and upstarts. "A little bit of old-school Test cricket," was how skipper Tom Latham summed up his side's efforts. They were far beyond what England's new-school XI was ever going to summon, with its five players on one cap or fewer.
Of course, now the series is fascinatingly poised for the final Test at Trent Bridge in the coming week, which is all you want in a Test series. Ticket sales will surge in what will be a glorious week of sunshine. The ECB's own investigation has meted out no punishment, beyond written warnings to captain Ben Stokes and Gus Atkinson for breaking the team's curfew after the Lord's Test. Both, along with Jamie Smith and Ollie Robinson are available again, with Joe Root back in the pack after breaching the 14,000-run mark. The restart from the winter's travails can, well, restart.
That is certainly the line England will peddle ahead of the Thursday start, just as they oozed positivity when making five changes and handing out three new caps for this match. Regardless of the situation, the house always wins. Except on the field here at The Kia Oval, of course.
Despite some notable highs across the past four years, Stokes, head coach Brendon McCullum and managing director Rob Key have compiled a dinner party of burned Tests in that same period, and this is another guest of honour. Oval 2026 will take its seat next to Wellington 2023, Oval 2024 and Hamilton 2024; Each had foretold a different chapter of English angst to come. This new diner will be contributing its own anecdotes soon enough.
England's lackadaisical start to the 2023 Ashes can be traced back to their unserious approach against New Zealand earlier that year, when already 1-0 up in the series. A Neil Wagner-inspired one-run win was followed by Stokes' lauding "the bigger picture", that disappointment in defeat was trumped by the "excitement" of the match.
They were similarly blasé in Hamilton 18 months later, though at least by then they had secured a first series win in New Zealand since 2007-08. The players enjoyed themselves after that achievement, and were subsequently on the receiving end of a mammoth 423-run defeat, during which Stokes suffered an injury that would rule him out for three months. All those misgivings were extrapolated a year later, during the 2025-26 Ashes.
Two years ago at this venue against Sri Lanka, England were so satisfied with their 2-0 scoreline against Sri Lanka that they decided to give the 20-year-old left-hander Josh Hull a debut in the third and final Test. Wet behind the years and still, to this day, working out his action, Hull did as well as could be expected with 3 for 53 followed by 0 for 38. That Test was also Dan Lawrence's last as a Test cricketer, shoved up to an unfamiliar opening position for the series purely to ring-fence the now-axed Zak Crawley's spot, who was nursing a broken finger at the time.
Hull, now 21, remains a work in progress. Lawrence, meanwhile, has taken until this season to rediscover his verve, with 788 County Championship runs for Surrey, including five centuries, across just 13 innings. The pair are at opposite ends of the experience scale, but the lesson was clear - throwing players into Test cricket without the right grounding, and in unfamiliar roles, is asking for trouble. One of many lessons they have not learned.
"I think it can be very difficult and a big ask of young players in particular to all come together in that space and not have that sort of continuity surrounding you," Root said in his post-match press conference.
It certainly seemed that way for two of England's three newbies, James Rew and Sonny Baker, but also for their third, Jordan Cox, whose own belated first go was modest, despite being an improvement on his previous false starts in white-ball cricket. Even the one-cap duo of Matthew Fisher and Emilio Gay deserved sympathy, as they looked to re-establish and establish themselves, respectively, amid looming uncertainty. This collective lack of familiarity manifested itself in different ways, including uncertainty as to where to stand in the field, misunderstanding directions from Root, and lapses in concentration.
But the situation has been especially harsh on Rew and Baker.
Rew only found out he was keeping on the eve of the match, after Jamie Smith was confirmed out on paternity leave following the birth of his second child. He had technically been on stand-by since the start of the week after McCullum had banked Cox - also a keeper - in the XI, but it was always going to be a big ask for any newcomer, let alone one called upon so late. The Somerset man was responsible for three of England's eight spurned chances.
Meanwhile, Baker toiled gamely but his 3 for 161 from 34.1 overs still comprise the most expensive economy rate for an debutant England seamer to have bowled at least 200 deliveries. That completed an imperfect hat-trick of debuts across formats, after being on the receiving end of the worst English figures for an ODI debutant and third-worse in T20Is.
Their misery has been compounded by the news that they will not be kept on for the third Test. News came through of that squad an hour after this one had left the ground to return to the team hotel. As challenging as it has been to maintain focus amid all the nonsense, Rew and Baker will feel a particular sadness at packing up while the circus moves on to Nottingham.
There was a time when this England set-up was a haven for newcomers. And yet the latest three are, for now, footnotes in an ECB stand-off with one of the country's most revered cricketers and captains.
Most of this falls at the door of Stokes, even if McCullum ceded "ambiguity" around the curfew. Stokes was involved in the policy's drawing-up, its finer points and its application, after demanding more professionalism and accountability from the players after the 4-1 Ashes defeat. To fall foul of his own rules is a dent in his leadership, whichever way you look at it.
He will return to the dressing-room well-respected, but there will be reservations. No one will seek to pull him up on that Sunday night, but they will remember the toll of this week and how that came to be.
English cricket's two-week holding pattern came about in an attempt to untangle the mess that derived from that nightclub escapade, but it has now resulted in the conclusion that there was no actual mess in the first place.
Meanwhile, a Test has been lost, two exciting debutants have been chewed up and spat out, and Stokes remains captain amid the public perception of more politics to negotiate, and less unity with McCullum.
Now, was that worth it?