Less of the Colonel and more Ashes cricket like that, please

Um, sorry … diligently working from home with deadline looming.

The conundrum is this: How on God's green earth are we going to endure an entire summer of prepubescent choir boys singing, "There's a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza…" on a KFC television advertisement that ambitiously calls on the nation to place fluorescent buckets on their heads in unbridled patriotic support of the national cricket team?

Not sure about you, sports fans, but I don't think I'm going to make it. I won't get through the Adelaide Test. Actually, I'd had enough of Liza and Henry and the hole in said bucket by the lunch break on day one of this Test … although I felt a compelling need to race to the nearest KFC and buy 65 pieces of the Colonel's finest.

In its own perverse way, these mind-numbing campaigns have highlighted the problem with cricket in this country for the past few years: an unnerving desire to turn the grand old game of bat and ball into a promotional gimmick to drag young eyeballs, maybe even tired old eyeballs, to a day of Test  cricket. Pools in the stands, day-night matches with pink balls, commentary from the radio boxes in which old war stories on the field and the bar are preferred over the score at the end of the over, chicken buckets beaten like a drum before being placed on your head … Madness.

And then, almost like it had enough of watching all this gibber from afar, the game of cricket threw something back at us: a gripping Ashes Test match played in the traditional and time-honoured manner of occupying the crease, holding up an end, holding your nerve and waiting to see which set of 11 men blinked first. Heading into day four, eyes were wide open. It was anyone's match before England shut their eyes and rolled over for 195 in their second innings, making it easy work for Dave Warner and Cameron Bancroft to chase down the target.

Australian captain Steve Smith's 141 runs from 326 balls will go down, by his own admission, as one of his greatest knocks – and probably his slowest. Shaun Marsh has had more chances at this level than Josh Dugan's had tattoos and while his cheap dismissal on day three means he hasn't yet justified his recall he did show the value of a No.6 who can – egads! – stick around and not get out as the skipper makes a match-defining ton.

Call me an old-fashioned slob on the couch but this is exactly what cricket needs: because it means something. It's absorbing and measured and its digs its claws in and prevents you from walking away. Give me slow-cooked chicken that's been simmering away in a spicy broth for 12 hours than a dirty chicken leg that's been fried down to a tiny little flap of skin before being hurled through your car window by the drive-thru attendant.

Yes, I get it. None of this romanticism for five-day matches pays the bills and with the comings and goings of each summer we continue to argue and debate and write angry missives on social media about the Big Bash, how many kids love it, why they love it, why they and their families watch so much of it on TV.

Cricket Australia chief executive James Sutherland's remarks to The Grade Cricketer podcast earlier this month about the future of Test cricket was alarming.

"In many ways, there's so much doubt about Test cricket and its future I think and in some parts of the world it really is in a desperate state," Sutherland said. "That's partly because it's just not commercially viable. If you go to India, the country where there is supposedly the most lucrative commercial market, the current valuations on a Test match, five days of Test cricket, is exactly the same as the valuation on a three-hour Twenty20 international match."

For his part, Sutherland has been proactive in trying to salvage and promote Test cricket. He has pushed ahead with the day-night Test in Adelaide, which we will again lap up from Saturday when England and Australia meet in the second Test, all of it in primetime for the slobs on the couch, thumbing the eating options on Deliveroo. More recently, Sutherland has been one of the driving forces behind the Test and ODI leagues that will be established across world cricket. Those leagues, hopefully, mean a few less Tests in Australia but will see the rise of a genuine world championship starting in 2019.

Can that save Test match cricket? We'll see.

What this first Ashes Test showed, however, is that five-day cricket doesn't need to rely on advertising gimmicks, on a faux war-of-words in the press, on calls for a new "Bodyline", on salacious stories about Jonny Bairstow giving Cameron Bancroft a warm and friendly headbutt in a Perth bar a few weeks ago (I mean, how else do you greet people?), to make it worthy of our attention.

And, unless you are 10 years old, it definitely doesn't need a KFC bucket on your head.