Standing up and being counted: Stephen Fleming has spent his entire career doing just that © Getty Images

As I write, Stephen Fleming requires 54 runs in New Zealand’s second innings in Napier to finish his Test career with an average of 40. Much as this shamefully unreconstructed Pom wants to see England win the series, I’d willingly trade that for a spot of statistical justice.

On the face of it, New Zealand’s highest runscorer in Tests is out of his depth. With nine centuries to date, he stands six behind Alec Stewart as the maker of the fewest hundreds by any amasser of 7000-plus runs. He is also the only member of that 32-strong elite bar Mike Atherton (37.69) to average under 40. Ultimately, though, whether he gathers those 54 runs should have no effect on how posterity treats him.

It is one of professional boxing’s few saving graces that commentators still attempt to identify the world’s best “pound-for-pound” pugilist, for all that proving as much is impossible. On the basis that he is a heavyweight with a flyweight’s economic resources, Fleming deserves to be remembered as the best pound-for-pound captain of modern times, if not ever.

In terms of longevity, nobody can match his 298 games (126 wins, 133 defeats) in charge. Leading New Zealand 80 times in Tests, second only to Allan Border’s 93, he won 28, drew 25 and lost 27: a better winning percentage, it bears noting, than Border, Atherton or Imran Khan. He also participated in three World Cups and 218 ODIs as captain: 25 more than his nearest rival, Arjuna Ranatunga. Overall, his one-day reign encompassed 98 victories, giving him a better winning percentage than Greg Chappell, Javed Miandad and Sunil Gavaskar.

His former teammate Mark Richardson commented a couple of days ago that Fleming was a dictator who may have exerted too much control, that he did it his way too often, at least until John Bracewell’s appointment as coach. The selflessness, nonetheless, shone through. “I'll have a lot of regrets, most of them statistical,” Fleming admitted last week, “because I haven't been able to gear myself up as a player who achieves statistically great things. I've tried but I've loved the thrill of the battle and the competition [too much].” If that sounded self-serving, a flimsy alibi for individual under-achievement, it should not.

The last time our paths crossed was at Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium shortly before the 2002-03 Ashes, during the ill-fated Power Cricket experiment. The previous winter, but for a couple of dubious umpiring decisions, New Zealand – aided, admittedly, by some charitable weather that prompted Steve Waugh to take undue risks - would have been the first to win a Test series in Australia since 1993. As it was, the hosts failed to prevail at home for the first time in a dozen rubbers. Only India have subsequently come so close to bearding the lion in its own den. No-one was in any doubt as to where the inspiration lay.

Fleming’s most important instruction was crystal-clear: ignore anything Glenn McGrath pitches outside the stumps. The fruits were plentiful: the galaxy’s most metronomic fast bowler wound up with five wickets in the series at 65 apiece. What a pity, the precipitously de-striped Fleming must have mused in recent weeks, that the likes of Bell, Sinclair and McCullum are too fond of nibbling, and far too indisciplined, to follow suit against lesser mortals such as Sidebottom, Anderson and Broad.

In essence, Fleming summed up that Welsh evening, it had been a case of refusing to be bullied. “The whole time we were [in Australia] we were bombarded with this, this…environment. Not intimidating so much as intense. But we were surprisingly confident after the planning we put in. You do so much preparation you make up the gap and breed confidence. They never bowled us out – we prided ourselves on that. You’ve got to stand up to them.”

Standing up and being counted: Stephen Fleming has spent his entire career doing just that. Let’s hope, for his sake, that he can drag that average up to 40, but his place in the game’s hall of fame, and our affections, should not depend on it.

	The redevelopment of Lord’s will see the Allen, Warner, Compton, Edrich and Tavern stands razed and rebuilt © Getty Images

So, let’s start with the proposed redevelopment of Lord’s, under which the Allen, Warner, Compton, Edrich and Tavern stands are all to be razed and rebuilt. Not all of the new constructions should retain those names. If that sounds sacrilegeous, so be it.

First, let’s dispose of the names that should survive. Few could argue with any legitimacy that the two newest stands, the Compton and Edrich, ought to. These two Middlesex mavericks did more than anyone, with the possible exception of Don Bradman, to recapture imaginations and reignite cricket as a spectator sport in England – and hence, arguably, the planet - after the second world war. A case could be made for a Brearley Stand, or even a Titmus Stand, in recognition of more recent county stalwarts, but not a terribly strong one.

At the other extreme is the Tavern Stand. Since the unpretentiously matey Tavern pub was reborn as the Tavern Bar and Brasserie in 2004, there is no longer any defensible justification for celebration, not least since, for “community relations reasons”, it is not open to the public on major matchdays. Why not – given that the old boy overlooks that part of the ground - the Father Time Stand? Or, better yet, given that no cricketer ever did more – wittingly or otherwise - for human rights, the D’Oliveira Stand?

Which brings us to the two contentious names, commemorating as they do Pelham “Plum” Warner and George “Gubby” Allen, the two MCC kingpins who, between them, effectively ran English cricket from the first world war until the Test and County Cricket Board took over most important matters in 1968 – and, in Allen’s case, beyond that.

Of the two, Warner offers much the fewer reasons for a damning reassessment. Born to privileged stock – his father, Charles, was an effective but divisive attorney-general of Trinidad known for his prejudice against Roman Catholics – Plum, by turns England captain, chairman of selectors, president of the MCC and editor of The Cricketer magazine for more than 40 years, is generally regarded as the most powerful figure in the game in the first half of the 20th century. He was perhaps best known, though, as manager of the MCC party on the Bodyline tour, the man at whom Bill Woodfull famously directed his ire after being felled by Harold Larwood in Adelaide.

	Plum Warner denounced Douglas Jardine’s “leg-theory” yet during the trip he stood timorously by © The Cricketer International

Before setting off for Australia, Plum denounced Douglas Jardine’s beloved “leg-theory” (sanctioned, lest it be forgotten, at Lord’s) yet during the trip he stood timorously by, putting up and shutting up. There is evidence to suggest he wrote to the MCC on every aspect of the tour yet not one syllable, curiously, can be found in the Lord’s archives.

The point is not whether Plum was an important figure worthy of lending his name to a stand at cricket’s citadel, but whether he did more for cricket as we now know it than, say, Richie Benaud? A Lord’s for the 21st Century should surely reflect the game’s evolution over the past half a century, on which Warner had no impact.

The same argument could be extended, and a good deal more strenuously, to the Sydney-born Allen, known as “Gubby” because his initials were G.O.B (“Gobby”, one assumes, was considered far too disrespectful). Like Warner, he cornered most of the plum jobs in English cricket; like Warner, he played as an amateur, and brought an amateur’s sensibility to bear (when he died, he left nearly £1m, the legacy of a prosperous career on the Stock Exchange). That’s why he could afford, in his most memorable contribution to cricket history, to refuse to do Jardine’s bidding. He was above “leg theory”, above pretty much everything and everyone. His job was to protect cricket, and if that meant playing politics, well, he wasn’t above that.

A letter to his parents during the Bodyline series, dated January 12, 1933, gives a taste of the sheer unadulterated snobbery: “D.R.J. came to me and said the following. ‘I had a talk with the boys, Larwood & Voce, last night and they say it is all quite absurd you not bowling “bouncers” … they say it is only because you are keen on your popularity.’ Well! I burst and said a good deal about swollen headed gutless uneducated miners…”

Due in no small part to his refusal to besmirch the “spirit” of cricket, Allen has enjoyed the sort of protection normally reserved for gods and religious leaders. In an authorised 1985 biography otherwise devoid of the merest hint of a flaw, his chum and pet journalist EW Swanton noted that one of their mutual friends considered Allen to be “difficult” and “irascible”. There was no elaboration. Ric Sissons, one of the game’s most industrious and respected social historians, hailed him for taking the power in English cricket from “the landed aristocracy to the middle class and men from the City”. Sissons also described him as “one of England's best all-round cricketers; a meticulous administrator and the perfect city-gent, who as Swanton concludes, it would be ‘difficult indeed to imagine Lord's and the game without'.” Less flattering character traits have since come to light, most notably in Brian Rendell’s new book, Gubby Under Pressure: Letters from Australia, New Zealand and Hollywood 1936-37.

The impression left by the letters, contends Stephen Fay in his review of the book in the latest issue of The Wisden Cricketer, is of “a control freak who insisted that he chose and ran the team and then moaned when they lost … he seems to have been happiest when he left the team behind and partied with film actors in Hollywood at the end of the tour.” He could also be cruelly sarcastic, as when responding to Walter Robins’s dropping of Don Bradman during the second Test: “It has probably cost us the rubber, but don’t give it a thought.”

	Gubby Allen: "a control freak who insisted that he chose and ran the team and then moaned when they lost"? © The Cricketer International

All that might still be forgivable but for the following observation, made after various sightings of aboriginals at train stations along the Nullarbor Plain: “They really are a ghastly sight and the sooner they die out the better.” As Fay notes with witheringly concise precision, those “ghastly” chaps “have lasted rather longer than Allen’s reputation”.

The hints of racism had first emerged during the so-called “D’Oliveira Affair” of 1967-68, when Allen, together with Billy Griffith and Arthur Gilligan - respectively MCC treasurer, secretary and president - decided not to pass on to the club the letter from Lord Cobham that made it clear that D’Oliveira’s inclusion would lead to the Pretoria government cancelling the ultimately abortive 1968-69 tour. “From the moment Allen, Griffith and Gilligan resolved to sit on the Cobham letter,” argues D’Oliveira’s most recent biographer, the political commentator Peter Oborne, “the MCC was deceiving its members, the cricketing public and the British government.”

Allen, it should be added, made it clear that he did not, in any case, rate D’Oliveira as a cricketer, a rather crass and blinkered piece of analysis given the latter’s displays, before and after, against the likes of Wes Hall, Charlie Griffith, Lance Gibbs, Bishan Bedi, Bhagwat Chandrasekhar, Dennis Lillee and Graham McKenzie. That this stance may have disguised a lack of sympathy with South Africa’s oppressed black majority is by no means improbable. “It would probably be wrong to say that Allen supported Apartheid,” wrote Oborne, “but he regarded anti-Apartheid protestors as enemies of decency, right thinking and the MCC. Balthazar Johannes Vorster’s white South Africa was an important part of the settled, traditional, closed world that the MCC believed it was there to protect.” Which is one reason why, when D’Oliveira was originally excluded from the tour party, “not one member of the MCC committee raised an eyebrow”.

Not that D’Oliveira represented the only instance of wonky cricketing judgment. For all his invaluable work as an administrator – the source, as with Warner, of his knighthood – Allen, a man in thrall to blood, sweat, tears and fears but threatened by those with natural gifts and a more relaxed demeanour, was also the prime reason as fine a batsman as Tom Graveney endured lengthy periods in the wilderness, notably in the prime years of 1963-65, when Gubby was chairman of selectors. But it was his insistence that cricket come before justice for black South Africa, before human beings, that most disqualifies him from being preserved as a positive symbol of all that is best about the game.

Bar Bradman, Allen and Warner, Gubby and Plum, have long been the most sacred of cricket’s ancient cows. It’s about time both were consigned to the field they belong – and put out to pasture. Renaming the Allen Stand the D’Oliveira Stand would be an apt step in the general vicinity of the right direction.

	'With the limited exception of Ryan Sidebottom’s bowling and Alastair Cook’s catching, it was the timorousness of it all, exemplified by that pitiful scoring rate, that galled' © Getty Images

Timidity. Mental cowardice. Unconfidence. Complacency. Ineffable bloody uselessness. And much, much worse.

Innumerable words, dispassionate and rabid alike, have been, and will continue to be, expended trying to get to the root of the collective hard-drive failure currently afflicting England’s premier national sporting teams (and yes, I am willfully ignoring Fabio Capello’s collection of “Am I bovvered?” soccer entrepreneurs, whose lack of interest can easily be traced to the absence of a match fee). There is, however, another possible explanation for this conspicuous lack of competence on cricket and rugby fields alike: expectation.

In many respects, the past weekend was one of the most cockle-grilling in recent memory, a veritable Underdog Day Afternoon for small towns and Celts, have-nots and never-will-haves. Chelsea and Manchester United and their Russo-American squillions were humbled in the FA Cup by Dickie Bird’s beloved Barnsley and Horatio Nelson’s Portsmouth; Cardiff City flew the flag for Wales in the same competition by duffing up Premiership Middlesbrough. On the international front, Scotland relieved England of the Calcutta Cup and New Zealand beat England for only the eighth time in 89 Tests. That’s the wonder of sport, the importance of sport. In what other public arena could so many little guys defy the gulf in resources and put one over their purported betters? In what other public arena, better yet, could one weekend produce so much heartening evidence that money really can’t buy you love, much less consistent success?

As it was at Murrayfield, so it was in Hamilton. Brian Ashton’s rugger-buggers lost because they lacked the imagination, commitment, mental fibre and consistency of performance required to beat lil’ old Scotland. Much the same could be said of Michael Vaughan’ cricketers, but to stop there would be a dereliction of duty.

The wind and the rain of wintry Edinburgh gave the former an alibi of sorts, as did the inescapable fact that, in a game involving constant physical contact, the form book is more likely to take a battering. Without wishing to detract in any way from Daniel Vettori’s exemplary leadership and the manful contributions of Messrs Fleming, Mills, Martin, McCullum, Patel, Taylor and How, Vaughan and company were guilty of something much more culpable. With the limited exception of Ryan Sidebottom’s bowling and Alastair Cook’s catching, it was the timorousness of it all, exemplified by that pitiful scoring rate, that galled. Not a terribly clever impression to leave on the weekend when it was revealed – in the ECB’s latest sly attempt to defuse the threat of the IPL – that the nation’s cricketers are on better pay-and-bonus deals than their rugby and footie-playing counterparts, making them among the best-rewarded international teams on the planet.

That England’s Test team has plummeted from grace since the 2005 Ashes cannot be denied. Nor can it be disconnected from two principal factors. One is the loss, primarily through injury, of more than one-third of the victorious XI at Trent Bridge – Marcus Trescothick, Simon Jones, Ashley Giles and Andrew Flintoff, all of whom should now be in their prime. The other cause, I am increasingly convinced, has less to do with misfortune and rather more to do with the pronounced shift in national identity that has been taking place over the past 50 years.

Vaughan said before the first Test that he felt his players’ most palpable weakness lay in the unmuscularity of their mental strength. To admit to such a shortcoming, in a game played primarily in the mind, gave Vettori the equivalent of a 100-yard flying start in a one-lap race. But this fatal flaw demands further examination.

For the best part of a century, England teams, bar those facing Australian bowlers and New Zealand forwards, took the field expecting to win. All that mattered was the margin, and perhaps the style. The same applied to the non-metaphorical battlefield. The West Indies, in 1950, and Hungary, three years later, sowed the seeds of modesty and, eventually, inferiority. Yes, three decades later, the home team were still being booed off at Wembley for failing to give opponents the anticipated stuffing, but eventually lessons were learned, the new world order grasped, humility reluctantly embraced, especially after the Argentinians had the audacity to invade the Falklands. Throw in the end of Empire, a waning global influence and a general postwar decline and, by the end of the century, even the smallest hints of a revival (Britpop, Britart, Euro 96, a series of Olympic rowing golds, a surge in property prices, a PM with a social conscience) were being seized upon as signs of a vibrant and enduring renaissance.

Then, in quick succession, came the 2003 Rugby World Cup and the 2005 Ashes, a brace of nationalistic triumphs that did not so much reaffirm the old superiorities as underline the degree of change. In defying the odds, the sides coached and coaxed by Clive Woodward and Duncan Fletcher defined the mood of the new millennium. Hope, the common currency of most nations and sporting teams, had finally, definitively, replaced expectation The overdogs were now the underdogs. And we rather liked it that way.

Trouble was, money had complicated the equation. Woodward and Fletcher profited from the players’ wellbeing, their sense of being appreciated, whether by dint of central contracts or – in rugby’s case - merely belated professional status. And with these rewards, to a greater extent even than those triumphs, came renewed public expectation - even though a well-stocked bank account is never any guarantee of sporting success. And the boys, bless their expensive cotton socks, simply don’t know how to cope, either on the field or in the Treasury.

Those giddy, clearly unsustainable property prices, such a regrettably reliable barometer of the national health, have stopped climbing. Foreclosures are mounting, debts skyrocketing, the mood now uncertain and downbeat. Perspective and proportion are being eroded by “reality” TV and the primacy of celebrity. Insularity is growing. We’d far rather blame immigration than complacency. Flags of St George are now more visible than Union Jacks, but you’d never know England remains one of the most prosperous corners of the globe.

England, meanwhile, have not won the Six Nations title since 2003, nor won a testing Test series in convincing fashion since 2005 (but for Ovalgate/Hairgate, a weakened Pakistan might well have only narrowly lost the 2006 rubber). The only stirring rugby exploits came when they were least expected, namely in the knockout phase of last year’s World Cup. Similarly, England’s most memorable five-day win came in Mumbai two years ago, against all prognostications. By way of confirming the trend, the ODI side blooms when up against it (in Sri Lanka and Australia, against India) and flounders when fancied (in New Zealand).

All of which, of course, gives rise to optimism ahead of the Wellington Test. Only three times previously have England conjured a 1-0 deficit in a three-Test series into victory, and while nothing else about their showing last week suggests they are capable of reversing the tide, reassuming the mantle of underdog will suit them down to the ground. For the sake of Vaughan’s long and mostly admirable reign, but mostly for cricket’s visibility in England, they’d better make the most of it.

That neither The Guardian nor The Times saw fit to flag up the Hamilton debacle on the front of today’s sports sections spoke an unpalatable truth, one that the ECB, and in particular the new selectorial triumverate of Geoff Miller, Ashley Giles and James Whitaker, will do well to acknowledge. Memories are short. Humiliation might have made for terrific headline fodder in the 1980s but at least Botham, Gower and co had an excuse: the opposition had become professional, in status as well as outlook. Kerry Packer may not have levelled the field but he had reduced the unevenness. And besides, the counties held far more sway then, the domestic fixture list was far more liable to breed burnout and selectors were about as patient and measured as a poodle on speed.

In 2008, on those wages, with this sort of backroom support, there are no excuses.

	If six weeks can really be found to accommodate a Twenty20 tourney, why on earth can a similar provision not be made for the game’s highest form? © Getty Images

Having stated, without the slightest hint of equivocation, that there was no earthly chance of a window being found in the Future Tours Programme to accommodate the IPL until the current TV agreements elapse, the global interest and player unrest fired by last month’s player auction prompted a remarkably swift backtrack. Well, maybe a teensy little spare pane could be found after all. What a pity that, unlike Tony Blair, Speed seems so unconcerned about his legacy. Had he been clever – and there’s still time to prove otherwise – he would be striving like buggery to find another window. For a proper World Test Championship.

With baseball belatedly joining in last year, cricket and American football remain the only major team sports without a world crown worthy of the name. The ICC tables redressed matters to an extent, but the scoring system is about as comprehensible as a Sanskrit to an Inuit, while the inaugural Champions v The Rest showpieces drew as rapturous a critical response as the collected recordings of Little Jimmy Osmond. No, if six weeks can really be found to accommodate a Twenty20 tourney, why on earth can a similar provision not be made for the game’s highest form?

All it requires is will, flexibility and a dollop of imagination. First, for reasons too many and obvious to mention, the Test table should be split into two six-team divisions with a couple of associate additions to thicken the lower tier: Australia, England, India, Pakistan, South Africa and Sri Lanka upstairs; Bangladesh, New Zealand, West Indies and (if we really must) Zimbabwe downstairs, reinforced by the Intercontinental Cup finalists.

The leading teams would be obliged to play home-and-away five-Test series against each other over a five-year period; the lesser lights could settle for three-match rubbers. In both cases, all teams would average 10 Tests a year, reducing wear and tear. At the end of every five-year period, the bottom two sides in the top flight would join the second division teams in a three-week knockout format to decide 1) which two gain/regain Test status for the next five years, and 2) which four qualify for the eight-team World Championship, which would feature quarter-finals, semi-finals and final over a three-week period. The trick would be to play games simultaneously. Neutral venues would add further spice. That said, in the interests of fairness and due reward, the two finals would be played on the soil of the division-leading teams.

Modesty ought to forbid, but the pros, I like to think, comfortably outweigh the cons. A programme of this ilk would bring Test cricket to two more nations. It would also leave oodles of scope for grubby activities such as naked profiteering - ideally an annual Champions League-style Twenty20 event – while satisfying the broadcasters’ lust for product. It would also breathe life anew into sport’s most necessary anachronism. So what if Ireland, say, enjoy an inspiring three weeks and wind up in the same division as Australia? This is a meritocracy we’re trying to create here. The worst thing that could happen is that the Wisden and Worrell Trophies would have to be put in mothballs until Allen Stanford’s investment bears fruit. Or England are relegated. It may be a closer-run thing than many imagine.

Besides, a quinquennial World Championship would be such a perverse hoot. Forget the Olympics and all those fervent copycats. Five years is both half a decade and the customary length of the post-Stalinist life plan – ie. a tad more meaningful than the length of a US Presidential term.