Andrew Strauss and Alastair Cook were filled with confidence after batting through an entire Test at the Sir Vivian Richards Stadium © Getty Images

1. The 2007 World Cup has not finished with cricket yet. It was, on many levels, perhaps the most disappointing sporting tournament since some very hungry lions ate all the Christians on day one of a scheduled 4-week festival of gladiator eating during the later stages of the Roman empire. The idiotic scenes at the Sir Vivian Richards Stadium proved that it retains the capacity to disappoint even two years after it spluttered into its barely merited place in some extremely unimpressed history books.

Building a cricket stadium without a useable cricket pitch anywhere in it, despite prior warnings not to build a cricket stadium there, displayed a similar level of crass-headed ineptitude as opening a restaurant and then shooting anyone who asked to see the menu, or constructing the world’s most advanced chemistry lab and staffing it with ill crocodiles.

2. Confidence is everything. This was proved by:

(a) England’s openers. In Jamaica, neither Andrew Strauss nor Alastair Cook showed many discernible signs of ever having held a bat or strapped on pads. However, suffused with inner belief after batting through an entire Test Match at the Sir Viv Stadium, they attacked the game at the ARG with purpose. When you see Strauss spank an off-drive for four early in his innings, you know that one of three things has happened: 1. You are watching a recording from 2004 or 2005; 2. You have taken a blow to the head and need to seek medical assistance; or 3. He is in prime form. Fortunately for England, it was the last of these.

(b) Allen Stanford. If you have the bare-faced balls to pitch up at Lord’s in a helicopter, you can get away with anything. For a while. Even if it’s not your helicopter.

3. Andrew Strauss reads The Confectionery Stall. The skipper quite clearly marched to the crease with a print-out of this pre-match statistical bleat about England’s failure to score big hundreds wedged inside his jockstrap. He kept it there until he had 169 to his name. Point proved, he then wrung it out and mailed it back to Confectionery Stall head-quarters with a little note saying: “Satisfied? When did you last score a Test 150?” To which the Confectionery Stall will respond: “Never. Yet. But also I have never chucked it away straight after reaching my century in a Test match. So, let’s call it one-all.”

4. Playing cricket against West Indies is like the Soviet Empire – not as terrifying as it used to be. England have faced 184 overs of spin in two Tests this series. That is, according to the Great Omniscient Lord Statsguru, only 48 fewer overs of tweaky stuff than they received from the West Indies during the entire decade of the 1980s. And bear in mind that many of those overs were bowled either to allow the bloodstains on the batting crease to dry out, or to prolong the England innings to give Greenidge and Haynes more of a rest before having to bat again.

5. The location of all Test matches should henceforth be kept secret until two days before the start of play. The ARG, usually the spiritual home of the run-glut, gave cricket a good game with a thrilling conclusion at less than 48 hours’ notice. The Sir Viv Stadium embarrassed a sport, a nation and a cricketing great after a nine-month gestation period in which, far from giving birth to a beautiful bouncing Test wicket, it pulled a bag of sand from under its shirt and said, “Sorry, I was never really pregnant. Someone should have looked at the six-month scan. It was quite clearly just a bag of sand.”

Furthermore, the wicket for the Karachi Test produced an almost entirely pointless match, 100 runs per wicket until Sri Lanka got bored on the last afternoon and tried to lose the game for a laugh. It was almost as if some shady conspiracy was at work to discredit Test cricket and remind cricket fans quite how tedious a five-day game on a meaninglessly dull pitch can be – while Virender Sehwag was blasting his first three balls into the stratosphere in a Twenty20 international. Very suspicious. No-notice Test matches will put an end to such subterfuge.

6. There is a clause in the England team’s central contracts that allows all brains to be disengaged within 20 minutes of the close of play. This is the only logical explanation for the ritualistic sending in Jimmy Anderson as night watchman on day three. It was an entirely thoughtless decision, if one can indeed describe as a “decision” something cannot possibly have been done with even a semblance of a decision-making process.

England, in a position of zero vulnerability, had no need to protect themselves. However, they evidently thought that they would be better safe than safe. Even having taken this ludicrously conservative step, to send in Anderson illustrated a total lack of cranial activity in the dressing room.

If they wanted to protect the front-line batsmen, why not send in Swann or Broad, decent batters and clean hitters with the capacity to attack, or even Harmison, who can give the ball a merry clubbing when the stars are in the correct alignment and who has a sound enough defence to take good stab at blocking out three overs from a partially-interested bowling attack? Anderson’s long but unproductive time at the crease, with a less-than-melodious Cook at the other end, meant that the real batsmen then batted in too much of a hurry.

It might seem a relatively insignificant matter, but it is probable that it cost England the game. In all, it betrayed a team severely lacking confidence in its own ability with bat and ball, and equally severely lacking in flexibility of thought. I know it’s only a game and I’m 34 with better things to worry about and children to feed, but it really annoyed me.

7. The cricket world knows that it still doesn’t know whether it is worth England’s while persevering with Steve Harmison. He bowled well enough through his sickness in Antigua, without showing conclusively whether he is (a) still a potential thoroughbred, (b) an occasional horse-for-a-specifically-bouncy-course, or (c) ripe for retirement to the ECB’s fast bowling stud farm at Old Trafford, to be bred with a special egg containing Harold Larwood’s DNA.

Harmison now possesses a frankly Mohammed-Sami-esque set of statistics dating back two-and-a-half years. From his breakthrough second innings 4-33 against South Africa at The Oval in 2003, to his 11-76 against Pakistan at an alarmingly springy Old Trafford in 2006, he took 146 wickets at 25. Since then, he has pocketed just 47 scalps in 18 Tests at an average of 46, albeit that he has occasionally chipped in with some useful runs. So which Harmison will emerge in Barbados? The bone-jarring destroyer, or the new Derek Pringle?

England urgently need a strike bowler – in their past eight full Tests, they have twice comfortably failed to defend sizeable fourth innings targets, and twice failed to bowl themselves to victory on the back of a vast first innings lead. (Since the end of the 2005 Ashes, 50 bowlers in world cricket have taken 30 or more Test wickets. Of these, only one of the 26 with the best strike-rates is English – Sidebottom, at 17th.) They also urgently need to decide whether that strike bowler will ever again be Harmison.

The current 'legal glitch' in Allen Stanford’s business proceedings has cast something of a shadow over the Antigua Test, a shadow in the shape of ECB chairman Giles Clarke’s eyebrows rising further and further up his head.

When the news of Stanford’s little commercial inconvenience broke on the BBC’s Test Match Special, qualified sage Vic Marks floated up a bit of Virgil’s Aeneid into the rough – “I fear Greeks bearing gifts,” he quoted, warming the hearts of those who believe TMS should still be broadcast entirely in Latin. The original, unexpurgated text of The Aeneid, recently discovered in a secret vault under the Lord’s pavilion, continued: “And I fear Greeks even more when they pitch up in a helicopter with 20 million bucks in crisp, non-sequential notes. The big wooden horse is one thing, and I’m not comfortable with it, but really, the chopper-and-cash combo is just vulgar.”

As soon as the rotor blade had first ruffled sacred Lord’s turf last year (reportedly prompting the late Sir Gubby Allen to spin so fast in his grave that he drilled his way out, rocketed skywards and is currently residing disgustedly in a low orbit over St John’s Wood, shaking his fists and dodging Russian satellites), many cricket lovers felt at best seriously queasy at almost every aspect of England’s involvement in Stanford’s little jolly. Others went further than reaching for the sick bag and immediately chundered involuntarily all over their Wisden collections, convulsing uncontrollably at the sheer affrontery and expensive cheapness of the entire sorry scheme.

Both those who felt the whole Stanford shebang was too good to be true and those who considered it too bad to be true have now been proved predictably correct. Stanford stands accused of what is, according the US Securities and Exchange Commission, “a fraud of shocking magnitude that has spread its tentacles throughout the world”. The SEC has seen a few magnitudinous frauds of late, so for it to be shocked suggests those tentacles belong to a disturbingly corpulent octopus.

Whilst acknowledging that even tycoons must be considered innocent until proven guilty, and whilst heeding the words of prominent Christian messiah Jesus Christ – “let he who has never been accused of an $8-billion fraud and had his assets frozen then tried to flee the country before going missing cast the first stone” – there were ample reasons to be cautious about Stanford when he first crashed through the window of English cricket consciousness.

These included:

• Hearing the words “Texan” and “cricket” in the same sentence.
• Hearing the words “billionaire” and “cricket” in the same sentence without the word “reclusive” also appearing.
• The Richard Illingworth tribute moustache. Given the choice of all the cricketers on whom Stanford could have modelled his sub-nasal coiffeur, the choice of Not-Particularly-Tricky Dicky should have set alarm bells ringing in the Long Room. Perhaps it did, but those alarm bells were evidently drowned out by the vibrant ‘ker-ching’ of a thousand imaginary cash registers.
• The revelation that Stanford does not like Test cricket. When translated into plain English, this essentially means that Stanford does not like cricket.

The ECB has emerged from this with egg on its face, in its hair, all over its jacket, and dribbling apologetically onto its shoes. In recent times, it has shown less aptitude for cricket administration than Josef Stalin demonstrated for fostering diversity in the creative arts. Clarke has spent the last couple of days shuffling as awkwardly as the odds-on favourite in the World’s Naughiest Schoolboy competition. He now bears the look of a man who had just nervously checked his roost and found a squawking armada of chickens making themselves very comfortable and wondering when their Welcome Home party will be staged.

His only defence is to claim that he had put a “No Returning Chickens Please” sign up outside the roost, and that, whilst he may have expected the poultry to return, he was not expecting them all back so soon and at the same time. However, as my grandmother used to say to me: “Don’t complain about being eaten by a horse if you’ve chosen to play polo dressed as a sugarlump.”

	“Mmm. These guys are a bit better than we expected, aren’t they? Mmm. What to do?" © AFP

It might seem mildly absurd following England’s supine dismissal for 51 to worry about batsmen making big hundreds. Concentrating on reaching two figures is a more pressing problem for the immediate future. In fact, the capitulation in Jamaica was so abject as to lead to considerable media speculation about a recall for Matthew Hoggard as a specialist batsman.

Andrew Strauss has endured probably the shortest and least romantic honeymoon period in cricket captaincy history, a one-night stay in a flea-infested seaside B&B rather than a three-week snorkelling and canoodling extravaganza in Mauritius.

So what should he say to his team as they strive to put the Jamaica ‘glitch’ behind them?

Here are some options for his consideration:

1. “We’ve got to get back on the horse, boys. And let’s try to make the horse move this time. Let’s not just sit on the horse until it gets bored and tips us off again. Let’s get on the horse, and stay on the horse. Right. Let’s go. Anyone know how to ride a horse?”

2. “Remember, lads, we’re not as bad as we looked in the first Test. Our performances over the last couple of years prove that. So when we go out on that field today, I want you all to remember that we are not a bad cricket side. We are an adequate cricket side. Now let’s go out there and prove that to the watching world.”

3. “Once more unto the breach, dear, er, friends... well, colleagues. Let’s go with ‘dear colleagues’... Once more. And let’s try not to make quite such a pig’s breakfast of the breach this time. And when I say ‘once more’, I acknowledge we are on central contracts and there isn’t exactly a queue of county players banging the selectors’ door down with a battering ram made out of their own averages. So, realistically, it will be ‘several times more unto the breach’. But if you want to be on that plane to South Africa next winter, I suggest you put in at least one or two good performances between now and the end of the Ashes. Or else. And, if I may borrow further from Henry V, Cooky, could you try to stand a bit more like a greyhound in the slips? Good lad. And could you also at least try not to prod tentatively at good-length balls outside your off stump. What was that, Alastair? I’m a hypo-what?”

4. “If the whole of the top six can throw their wickets away irresponsibly for 97 thus letting the rest of the team down, we’ll be in with a chance.”

5. “Belly, I have full confidence in you. I am absolutely sure you’ll be able to get a full tray of drinks out to the middle in an hour’s time without spilling any of it. I know you can do it at this level.”

6. “Mmm. These guys are a bit better than we expected, aren’t they? Mmm. What to do? Right, got it. Hey guys, I want to get rid of the coach. Can someone leak that into the public domain please. Thanks.”

One of the more curious aspects of England’s unimpressive recent cricket is the amount of criticism directed at the one batsman who has risen above the swamp of mediocrity in which the rest of the top order have been paddling their increasingly leaky rubber dinghy. Kevin Pietersen’s tightrope-walk between audacity and idiocy has polarised opinion like a man painting a bear head-to-toe in Tippex, and has, without question, deflected more searching analysis from those who merit it more. Was his miscued first-innings thwack at Suleiman Benn an irresponsible grab at personal glory or a poorly-executed but tactically-justifiable attempt to dominate a dangerous opponent? Or both? Did Pietersen act like a spoilt child hurling himself into a vat of jelly babies, or like the head of a bird welfare charity putting all the takings from a charity food fight on a 10-1 shot in the 2.40 at Chepstow in an effort to secure a better future for some little orphan ducks? Only Pietersen and almighty Zeus may ever know.

It is, however, an unarguable fact that the Pietermaritzburg Pulveriser regularly fails to batter his opponents into quivering pulverised wrecks, as he is clearly capable of doing. And this is despite having what may well be Test cricket’s best conversion rate for turning 50s into 90s – 19 times out of 27, a marginally better ratio even than the voraciously undismissable Bradman. However, KP’s problems begin as soon as he arrives within 10 of his century. And here comes Dr Statistics to prove it. He’s holding a clipboard, he’s brandishing his stethoscope, and he wants you to pay attention.

In Test history, 80 players have scored 90 or more at least 15 times. Taking their average scores in those innings of 90-plus, Pietersen has the 79th-best record of those 80 players, better only than renowned serial century-flunker Michael Slater. Here is Exhibit A.

So while Pietersen generally succeeds in capitalising on good starts, having done so, he fails to capitalise on that initial capitalisation. His 15 centuries have averaged only 137 – only Michael Atherton of the 59 players with as many hundreds as Pietersen averages lower for his centuries (135) – see Exhibit B. There were, of course, mitigating circumstances for the Lancashire limpet. By the time he had staggered across the three-figure threshold, he was usually at a point of total mental and physical exhaustion after a two or three long days of heroic defiance.

By comparison, of Pietersen’s contemporaries, Ponting’s centuries average 175, Sehwag’s 199 (helped by the fact that his last 11 centuries have been over 150), Kallis’ 214 (helped by a suspiciously large number of not-outs), Sangakkara’s 276, and Chanderpaul’s 278 (also a not-out-assisted figure, aided by the rank incompetence of his tail-enders). And if Pietersen wants advice on how to punish opponents when on top, he should knock on the hotel room door of his England coach Andy Flower, tell him to lift his head out of his hands and stop repeatedly muttering “What have I got myself into?” to himself, and demand to know how he contrived to make his 12 centuries for Zimbabwe average a frankly ludicrous 340.

It should be noted that Pietersen’s figures are damaged by the fact that he has never been remained undefeated scoring a century, and has sometimes sacrificed his wicket when batting with the tail in an effort to secure runs for the team rather than red ink for himself. His is not the record of a selfish player. On the occasions when he has perhaps been dismissed trying to stamp his own distinctive supremacy on a match, it is perhaps because he knows that if he does not do so, with Flintoff out of form, there is not another England batsman who either will or can.

However, after England’s Ashes humiliation in 2006-07, Pietersen himself talked passionately about the need for himself and his team-mates to score big hundreds. They have almost totally failed to do so – of their 28 centuries since then, only four have been over 150, and 12 have been under 110. The frustration and fascination of Pietersen as a batsman is his rare mixture of brilliance and vulnerability. His “that’s the way I play” claim essentially suggests that if he removes the latter, he will lose some of the former. But his ascent to true cricketing greatness will wait until he is able to turn his outbursts of stunning virtuosity into match-determining dominance.

The failure to capitalise on centuries is not Pietersen’s failing alone. England as a team have for some time shown little interest in scoring big centuries. Players seem to lose one or more of concentration, motivation or their general mental faculties once the advertising logo on the back of their bats has been waved at the requisite number of cameras (one of the more irritating and distasteful aspects of the modern commercialisation of cricket – a moment of proud personal triumph debased into a glib publicity opportunity, rather like a husband and bride eating Heinz Baked Beans in their wedding photographs, or a priest reciting the slogans of top whisky companies at an alcoholic’s funeral).

Strauss and Cook both have even worse century-inning averages than Pietersen, and Vaughan and Trescothick were only a little better. Since Graham Gooch’s 333 against India in 1990, the highest score by an England player is Pietersen’s 226 against West Indies in 2007 – the 51st highest score in all Test cricket since Gooch trudged back to the Lord’s pavilion burning with a mixture of pride in his achievement and abject disgust and self-loathing at being bowled by Manoj Prabhakar on a flat track.

Quite why England are so unable to score big is a mystery. No doubt some will their finger of blame at: the advent of colour television lowering our national boredom threshold; or a post-colonial unwillingness to assert English dominance; or the end of rationing; or Kolpak players and Tony Greig; or Gordon Brown and the bankers. It is probably a combination of all of these and more.

Gooch’s innings, incidentally, remains the only English score of 250 or more in my lifetime. Which puts England three 250s behind Zimbabwe. In fact, other countries’ players have notched up 42 such scores between them. Also in fact, since the momentous event of my birth, of the eight major Test nations, England have the lowest combined century-innings average, the second worst conversion rate of centuries in 150s (ahead of New Zealand) and the worst conversion rate of centuries into double centuries. England have averaged one double century every 25 Tests – the other nations between them score one on average every 11½ matches. Perhaps my entry into the world was not the turning point for English batsmanship that everyone had hoped it would be.

(Thanks again to Cricinfo’s Statsguru facility for its invaluable assistance in this blog. I am now firmly of the opinion that Statsguru is not only the greatest sporting statistical aid in the world, but also the single greatest invention in the entire history of the universe. Without it, the research for this article would have taken several years and at least one marriage.)

Oops. From an England perspective, that Test match was, at best, a blooper. A joyous occasion for a resurgent West Indies, and thus for world cricket as a whole, but, for England, a 24-carat debacle; a pure, unadulterated fiasco sandwich with lashings of farce. Even the most riotously optimistic England supporter would struggle to find more than the most lukewarm of positives to snuggle up to on these cold winter nights. And as an England fan, it is hard for me to find much humour in a situation so cricketingly bleak, especially when the rest of the cricket world is already laughing its head off.

Two days after the event, English cricket is still stumbling around in a state of catatonic shock, this fresh embarrassment heaped upon its recent upheaval, which possibly explains coach Andy Flower’s almost outlandish suggestion that it is now “best to stay calm and not to have knee-jerk reactions on selection”.

While I accept that it may be necessary after such a humiliation to allow sufficient time for the investigating authorities to bag and label all the evidence, I would argue that neither staying calm nor artificially fixing the selectorial knee in a rigid brace is now a sensible course of action. The selectors’ response to England’s prolonged stagnation over the last two years suggests that the knee in question is monumentally arthritic in any case – any sign that it retains some capacity at least for bending, if not full jerking, would now be welcome. If Owais Shah does not play in the second Test, he would be fully justified in rifling through Ian Bell’s bag to see if Edgy from Edgbaston possesses incriminating photographs of the selectors dressed up like Douglas Jardine and the Nawab of Pataudi at a Bodyline-themed orgy.

I have detailed England’s batsmen’s diminishing returns in previous pieces. In the illusory name of loyalty, England have accepted and indulged adequacy for too long from too many, and their obstinate refusal to contemplate shuffling their batting pack from time to time has left them in the avoidably idiotic position of having a swathe of players in career slumps but no-one with more than fleeting Test experience to replace them.

Bell and Cook have both shown sufficient qualities to suggest that they will be good Test players for some time, but surely both would benefit from a spell ironing out the technical and mental quirks of their games away from the pressure of international cricket, to relearn the art of building an innings in less demanding surroundings (Bell’s 199 at Lord’s against South Africa immediately followed a double century for Warwickshire). The Australian teams of recent vintage suggest that many if not most batsmen peak in their late 20s and early-to-mid 30s. For England to obsessively retain their younger players may even be to their long-term detriment.

	For how much longer can England rely solely on Pietersen, the Hampshire Hammer? © Getty Images

Without nostalgically longing for a return to the breakneck selectorial speed-dating of the 1980s (when attending a Test match had the added frisson that most of the spectators could entertain realistic hopes of playing in the following game), being dropped should not be a cataclysmic event. Ideally, England should reach a situation where they effectively have a squad of 16 or 17 players who can make up the match XI according to form and fitness, rather than according to from whom the ECB feels it needs to its their central contract’s money’s worth.

The two most disturbing aspects of England’s performance were the familiarity of the failings – the visual and statistical evidence is clearly of a team which is not only failing to learn its lessons, but is skiving school altogether – and the increasingly disturbing dependence on Pietersen.

The Hampshire Hammer is the only batsman scoring hundreds regularly (9 in his last 23 Tests, plus two 90s; by comparison, Strauss has 4 centuries in his last 26 matches, Cook 1 in 20, Bell 2 in 22, Collingwood 2 in 18, and Flintoff 1 in 35). He is also currently the only frontline batsman who is both willing and able to attack to the opposition (even Flintoff is striking less than 50 per 100 balls since his return last summer). England urgently need at least one more aggressor – too often a couple of wickets leads to a near-total scoreboard paralysis.

Pietersen’s wicket is therefore now worth too much to both England and their opponents. If Alfred Hitchcock were directing the television coverage of England’s Tests, whenever Pietersen is out in a tight situation, he would cut straight to close-up shots of the widening eyes of the rest of the team, accompanied by three dramatic, discordant violin chords. (One also assumes that Hitchcock would put an end to the irritatingly excessive use of the zoom whilst the ball is in flight between bowler and batsman.)

Nevertheless, from a broader cricketing perspective, this was an inspirational match in many ways, with Benn providing their best slow bowling since Gibbs, and Taylor their best spell of fast bowling since the retirements of Walsh and Ambrose ended the forty-year lineage of great Caribbean pacemen. As new dawns go, this promises to be far less false than any of recent vintage.

England, however, are a team with serious, long-standing problems. So, for my second Ashes prediction, I now confidently revise my previous 2-2 forecast to a disgruntling 3-1 Australian win. The Aussies may be declining, but they can be confident that England are getting worse faster.

I woke this morning with an increasingly unusual feeling in my cricketing belly – one of genuine anticipation. This emotion, of course, has almost been successfully and completely excised from the cricketing calendar by the powers that be, as they pile wodge upon wodge of increasingly indistinguishable contests on top of each other, crammed into the few remaining crannies of time available.

	'Pietersen appears to be in vengeful mood, like Anne Boleyn after her husband had had her head chopped off, only with his head still attached to his central nervous system, and therefore more able to act on his anger than the young church-schisming temptress of Kent and England' © Getty Images

Furthermore, as a die-hard lover of the five-day game, Test matches increasingly seem to me to be tagged on as a regrettable but contractually essential precursor to an interminably tedious one-day series, which would be forgettable were anyone able to take enough notice of it in the first place for its existence to register in their brain before being lost into the swamp of time and the ICC rankings.

However, hearing the words “Sabina Park” on the radio instantly conjured up childhood memories of listening to terrified English commentators describing even more terrified English players in the terrifying heyday of the Caribbean pace attack, and of trying to work out if the resounding clonk I had just heard was leather on bat (unlikely), leather on stump (likely), or leather on nose (probable).

This is a series that possesses that rarest of cricketing commodities – rarity. It is only the second time in the last 11 years that West Indies have hosted England in a Test series. (Admittedly, when the two sides reconvene for a hastily-arranged two-match series in England in May, minutes after concluding business in the Caribbean, and seconds after some of the players have returned from briefly adorning the non-business end of the IPL, it will be the third time in five years that the two have met in England, it will begin almost before the and looks set to smash all records for Least Eagerly Awaited Test Series Of All Time.)

There are other factors adding to the excitement. Under their new captain Strauss, England are entering a new dawn, albeit with the same players who have boldly woken up on its last few new dawns, stretched, pulled back the new curtains, calculated the minimum allowable performance to avoid being dropped, hit the snooze button and settled down for a well-deserved lie-in, whilst Owais Shah sits alone in the breakfast room, picking at his corn flakes with an increasingly irritable spoon.

England should win, although, hopefully, not quite as easily as in recent series between the two, if only because of the height of their bowlers – the most successful bowlers in the Caribbean recently include Harmison, Nel, Clark and Shabbir Ahmed – and because deposed skipper Pietersen appears to be in vengeful mood, like Anne Boleyn after her husband had had her head chopped off, only with his head still attached to his central nervous system, and therefore more able to act on his anger than the young church-schisming temptress of Kent and England. This is all dependent on someone concocting a method of dismissing Chanderpaul, who is arguably now the single most important player in world cricket, as well as the oddest.

A few statistical pointers:

The Lara Effect

Chanderpaul averaged 44 before Lara retired at the end of 2006, but a Bradman-embarrassing 104 since then. The team’s next best two batsmen have also posted more impressive numbers since the great Trindadian swished his spectacular bat for the final time. Both Sarwan and Gayle averaged 38 before his retirement; they average 45 and 44 respectively since.

Fast Bowlers

In their last 16 Tests, Steve Harmison averages 47, Fidel Edwards 32, and Jerome Taylor 31. Harmison does however average 24 in 12 Tests against West Indies.

Spin Bowlers

Since 1980, England’s specialist spinners in the West Indies have taken 53 wickets in 6 series at an average of 49.70.

England’s stagnant batsmen

Excluding Pietersen (50) and Flintoff (32), five of England’s current top 7 have career averages in the low 40s. However, their recent form is less impressive.

Cook: career average 42. Last 19 Tests: 36. First 17 Tests: 48.
Strauss: career average 42. Last 24 Tests 37. First 31 Tests: 46.
Bell: career average 41. Last 21 Tests: 36. First 24 Tests: 45.
Pietersen: career average 50. Last 20 Tests: 45. First 25 Tests: 54.
Collingwood: career average 42. Last 24 Tests: 37. First 17 Tests: 48.
Flintoff: career average 32. Last 12 Tests: 24. First 60 Tests: 33.
Prior: career average 40, but excluding century-spanking debut, has averaged 33 over 11 Tests.

(And not forgetting Vaughan: career average 41. Last 22 Tests: 33. First 60 Tests: 44.)

The statistics speak for themselves. Exactly what they are trying to say is not clear, and the selectors almost certainly are sticking their fingers in their ears and humming the Test Match Special theme tune to themselves, but they are certainly speaking.

Possible interpretations of their utterances include:

• “These boys have been operating in the comfort zone of undroppability for too long.”
• “Moores was really, really adequate.”
• “They still haven’t got over the 5th day at Adelaide in 2006.”
• “If at least two or three of you don’t swing your career curves upwards again, you could lose this series.”

Finally, an apology. To Jack Russell. I have lain awake over the last few nights tormented by feelings of guilt and anguish that I have perpetrated a grave injustice by including the Gloucestershire genius in my World’s Dullest XI. His sublime glovework alone should have rendered him beyond consideration, let alone selection, and his batting provided far too fascinating an insight into the curious psyche of a tatty-hat-wearing painter-cricketer. Selectors often make mistakes – I am prepared to be the first in history to admit my error in public.