England Hit Bottom, Keep Digging

GH on the on-going omnishambles

The ECB: a recent image

Five changes. Two blokes unavailable because they were on the piss. One bloke out because his wife was pregnant. Old stager as emergency captain. No spinner, a backstop as a keeper and four number XIs. It could be a week at your local club or village; it was England coming into the Oval Test. And it’s worked out as well as it usually does, in abject humiliation, by 253 runs to New Zealand.

If it were possible, the margin flattered the home side, who torched a series lead with their sixth defeat in eight Test starts. Have they looked so limp and directionless as the first session of the second day, when the Test was in the balance, and their monotony of short balls and mediocrity of out cricket was an affront to the viewing public? Baz McCullum lolled on the balcony, Jofra Archer lazed in the outfield, Glenn Phillips and Kyle Jamieson laid into everything. Looking into the sun sometimes constitutes a semblance of an excuse when an outfield catch is dropped, but hardly when Ben Duckett had sunglasses perched above the brim of his cap. At least when England last played under Joe Root, it was with a kind of clenched and hangdog earnestness. With its phoney aggression, shabby inattention to detail and insipid obeisance to a muddle-headed plan, this was Bazball turned Badball.

That line of Kafka’s came to mind, about every revolution ending and leaving behind only a slime of bureaucracy. Because for the last fortnight, England have fallen back on old self-entangling propensities. Muddled selection. Management speak. Mental health mumbo jumbo. Earnest invocation of The Cricket Regulator, which sounds like the Hambledon club newsletter. Plus, of course, self-harming press conferences: when you’re asked whether your team is a ‘national embarassment’, as Rob Key was before the Test, you’re halfway there.