The Australian side were coltish in their warm-ups, confident that wicket-taking ought only to be a matter of time and the Ashes would be theirs.
But in the end they will probably be moved by the coltish quality of gawky beauty which she brings to the part and which feels just right for a wild-spirited country girl.Vladimir Nabokov, who himself translated "Eugene Onegin", described its intricate rhyme scheme as a spinning ball; the pattern blurs with speed in the middle, but is slower and more visible at the edges.
This was the one that said that England, for all their coltish promise and good intentions, faced not so much a moment of truth as a long and hurtful mugging.
Elsewhere too, Mariah Gale does her best as Juliet, with flashes of passion, desperation and coltish stubbornness.
Joe is played as a teenager and young woman by British newcomer Stacy Martin, an actress with grace, humour and a coltish beauty.
She has a farm outside London where she keeps hens and donkeys and, with her coltish "new faces" bustling around her for a chat, it is easy to imagine her hurling feed around a yard full of squawking chickens.
The near sold-out 12,500 crowd were sent home happy after another stunning Mo show, and much else besides – not least the sight of the coltish 19-year-old Canvey Islander Jessica Judd smashing through the two-minute barrier for 800m with her second landmark victory in seven days.
Matsuev made something bright and brilliant of the symphony's remarkably Bartokian first movement, and brought a coltish energy to the tumultuous finale; Kavakos's performance was typically commanding in the concerto, which emerged as an eloquent and noble work.
The process began to be widely recognised seven years ago, during the Confederations Cup, in which Germany practised hosting the World Cup with a coltish willingness to attack that some of us ascribed to the difference in personality between Klinsmann and, say, the old-school graduate Berti Vogts, who had managed his country to ultimate triumph over the Czechs at Wembley in 1996.
Chambers knows all about the threat of Christophe Lemaître, the coltish 20-year-old French flyer who won European outdoor gold in the 100m, 200m and the 4x100m relay in Barcelona last summer and who gained global fame as the first white sprinter ever to break 10sec for 100m.
In a 1955 television interview with Edward R. Murrow, the ninety-four-year-old artist is at once pert and stoical, with something about her of a coltish girl who has learned patience by hard practice.
