Too little, too late

Ignore an atoning little flurry at the death, England’s cricket winter has been a ghastly shambles. Embarked upon with such overweening bumptiousness — an arrogance admonished by this corner in the autumn, I might add — the expedition has long been a wrecked write-off all round. The Ashes urn was spinelessly surrendered — against admittedly a mighty fine team — by five-nil. In the follow-up one-day tournament England have been almost as pitiful. That has not quite finished as I write, but should they fluke a second place in the three-horse race, such a travesty should not remotely be allowed to camouflage the excruciating campaign. ‘Sorry we have let down people at home,’ muttered the monosyllabic coach, Duncan Fletcher, when he was finally forced to show his face above the parapet. He can say that again, and again.

In fairness, in Fletcher’s seven-year stewardship he did take the England team from laughing-stock to, well, Trafalgar Square. Alas, in just a couple of months he has marched them down again to the original comic-store base camp. Presumably it is too late to change the pilot before next month’s World Cup in the Caribbean but, surely, only an outright victory there — as likely as a cow jumping over the moon — will keep Fletcher in his job. The selectors, too, should be scanning the sits-vac columns. Seven years ago Fletcher said his target was victory in the 2007 World Cup: England go into that tournament with the lamentable seven-year one-day win-loss tally of 37-77.

Many of you (or, rather, us) regard one-dayers as party-frock passing fancies to take or leave. Main charges against Fletcher and his ludicrously over-egged back-up team of head-shrinkers, leg-strain men, earache-experts etcetera (they should be on notice, too) concern the gruesome Ashes debacle.