English cricket doesn’t travel well 

It’s a tricky old time for cricket. The collapse of England’s World Cup white-ballers – and how they have managed to run up the white flag with quite such aplomb – is one of the great sporting mysteries of our time. One day they are the best in the world and hot favourites; the next they have soured overnight, like a pint of milk left out for too long.

Answers on a postcard please, as Ben Stokes admitted. English cricket has never travelled particularly well, which may have something to do with the conditions here being very different from those in nearly all the other top cricketing nations. England breeds lots of very good medium pacers who can swing and seam the ball in home conditions; overseas they find the ball stubbornly stays on a dead straight trajectory from the hand to the meat of the opponent’s bat and from there with a resounding thwack into the stands.

And what works on a flat pitch on a sunny day at Lord’s often doesn’t on a Bunsen on a hazy day in Calcutta. Then again, as Moeen Ali said, ‘We’ve just been rubbish throughout.’ No argument there, Mo. English cricket has also made a lifelong study of neglecting spinners, who have shown their immense worth for other nations contesting this World Cup.

I think it is unlikely England will field a whole new XI when they resume white ball cricket after the World Cup. There don’t seem to be many names in the current Lions squad on a training camp in the UAE fit to take the places of Joe Root, Jos Buttler or Stokes himself, though Mike Atherton’s son, the Middlesex spinner Josh de Caires, has promise to burn and should be wheeling away for England before long.