Ditch the delusion, Bazball requires a rethink - Chris Waters

What’s that old saying about a team only being as good as its last match? Well, England have lost four Tests on the trot and sit second-bottom of the World Test Championship. Not much of a return.

The problem, observing from afar, is that the side appears to be caught up in its own hype, in the belief that it is somehow saving Test cricket in the way that it plays, that results are not the be-all and end-all.

Although one agrees with that last point up to a point, it does sound rather cheap considering the central contracts system, the ultra-professional modern environments and the considerable sums of money paid to those involved. If results weren’t important, why bother?

You don’t have to look too hard to see why England lost the series; only one of their batsmen, Zak Crawley, averaged over 40, and even he didn’t manage a hundred, his series of unconverted starts a tale in microcosm. Joe Root averaged 35, Ben Duckett 34, Ollie Pope 31, Jonny Bairstow 23, Ben Foakes 20 and Ben Stokes 19, yet some of that cast seems undroppable.

Take out the efforts and emergence of young spinners Shoaib Bashir and Tom Hartley, who shared 39 wickets, as well as Pope’s once-in-a-lifetime 196 in the first Test win, and England would have lost 5-0 and the tour would have been a complete disaster.

As it was, a series that they could - and at a stretch should - have won ended with a similar beating; indeed, had England taken their chances earlier in the series, it would have been fascinating to see the effect on the Indian psyche had they come under serious pressure of losing at home.

The way that England lost on Saturday was pathetic, if predictable.

Duckett’s dreadful shot to the 11th ball of the innings - bowled as he charged Ravichandran Ashwin, who marked his 100th Test with a five-fer - set the tone for a collapse to 195 all-out in which only Root (84) stood up.

Duckett knows only one way to play and, it would seem, only one way to speak, given the sort of ultra-positivity (actually, pie-in-the-sky piffle) that emanates from his mouth and those of his colleagues, as though parroting the preachments of a religious sect.

Although some of that could be show for the cameras (why, though?), one suspects that not all of it is and that the inner sanctum is, in all probability, as deluded as the average Roman emperor.

Once the dust settles, as it quickly must, it is time to look at some new young batsmen in the shires, plying their trade with those quaint entities otherwise known as county cricket clubs.

It is time also to accept that the domestic schedule - into which The Hundred is about as welcome an insertion as a red-hot poker up the back passage - is unfit for purpose and working against the Test team.

This is not news to anyone who actually follows cricket, of course, or who knows anything about the game – only to those who run it.