OLIVER HOLT: This Ashes series has gripped the nation like few others… Ben Stokes and England’s style cannot help but be infectious

What the great Spurs Double-winning captain, Danny Blanchflower, said about the essence of football is often recalled wistfully by romantics now that we live in a sporting age that sometimes feels as if it is under siege from cynicism, commercialism and pragmatism.

On Friday, after another day when watching an England cricket team play the game made everyone inside Old Trafford feel glad to be alive, another day when sport lifted the soul with its joy and its derring-do, his words bore repeating.

‘The great fallacy is that the game is first and last about winning,’ Blanchflower said.

‘It’s nothing of the kind. The game is about glory. It is about doing things in style, with a flourish, about going out and beating the other lot, not waiting for them to die of boredom.’

If he were alive now, we would probably call his philosophy Blanch-ball, because everything has to have a name so that we can more easily lionise it or ridicule it. If he were alive now, he would love this England team and he would recognise in their captain, Ben Stokes, a kindred spirit.

Ben Stokes’ England have gripped the nation with their style of play throughout the Ashes

Jonny Bairstow’s batting and Mark Wood’s bowling meant England once again dominated at Old Trafford

Stokes led his side off at the end of the day with the outfit in a position to level the series

What a day. Again. What a day in an Ashes series that has gripped the nation like few others. What a day to be an England supporter and to see its team playing so audaciously and expressively and with a joie de vivre that cannot help but be infectious. What you call it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t have to have a name but it is wonderful to watch.

Jonny Bairstow was central to the story and that made the narrative even more delicious. The England wicketkeeper was prey to Australian cynicism at Lord’s when he was the victim of the most controversial stumping in Ashes history and his assault on Australia’s bowling attack felt like a measure of sweet revenge.

Bairstow was magnificent. He came to the crease with England at 437 for five and propelled them towards 500, past 500 and towards 600 with beautiful stroke play and power-hitting that was so brutal it even made Stokes’s jaw hit the floor as he watched from the England dressing room.

One six, hoisted high over deep midwicket, and far into the stands, brought gasps from the crowd as well as roars of celebration.

That took Bairstow to 86 off 71 balls, within sight of Gilbert Jessop’s quickest-ever England Test century, scored off 76 balls in 1902.

‘A cyclone of batting,’ the great Manchester Guardian cricket correspondent, Neville Cardus, called that innings and now journalists watched from the press gallery named after him at Old Trafford as Bairstow gave a passable impression of a tornado, scattering Australia and leaving the wreckage of them all around.

Part of the magic of the day was seeing how boldly England went about their business, how fearlessly and with such joy in the game. Not for the first time in this series, the Australians were reduced to ringing the boundary with all of their outfielders. Their attitude screamed defeatism and bewilderment. England toyed with them, running quick singles even when the ball went through to the wicketkeeper.

Alex Carey might have ‘stumped’ Bairstow at Lord’s but he couldn’t hit a barn door with a banjo at Old Trafford. Bairstow must have enjoyed that, too. The crowd certainly did.

There was something strangely fitting about Bairstow, a man who has a complicated relationship with fortune, finally being left stranded on 99 not out. By then, England had reached 592, their eighth-highest Ashes total.

To nobody’s great surprise, they had scored those runs faster than in any other of the biggest innings in Ashes history. The only other team to have scored at anything near this rate was Steve Waugh’s great Australia team. Stokes’s England outscore them easily.

England, and Bairstow, went about their business boldly and fearlessly, enjoying the game

Bairstow smashed an unbeaten 99 from 81 balls that included 10 fours and four sixes

Alex Carey was humbled at Old Trafford after allowing Bairstow to run several byes

Wood took three top-order Australian wickets to leave England needing just six more for victory

The day ended with Mark Wood tearing in from the James Anderson End and snaring Steve Smith, still Australia’s most prized wicket, half an hour before the close and then Travis Head with 10 minutes to spare.

With the Australians still 2-1 up, England are closing in on the greatest comeback in the annals even of this storied old contest. Only the weather can stop them here now.

The rain will come on Saturday and give Australia respite. Maybe the bad weather will linger on Sunday and deliver them from their torture. Maybe Pat Cummins’s team will crawl over the line on bloodied hands and knees, giving thanks for Manchester’s dark clouds and dark mills, and retain the Ashes with a Test to spare, making the Oval an irrelevance.

If the Australians survive, it will be a victory for pragmatism and conservatism. That will not change the way it looks in the history books but it will not steal away our memories of days like these, either. Days when England did things with style and with a flourish, days when they thrilled us with their determination to prove that the game is about glory.