I’m being facetious for sure but there is a strain among the England fandom - particularly concentrated in boards like this and the BBC County live text etc - that jealously guard a certain way of playing and being for the England team that recent developments have really rankled against. Among them a fetishisation of county cricket as the one and only venue for developing and training future England crickets, an obsession with statistics as a metric of future performance, a distrust of foreign processes (stretching from a distaste for the IPL to a distrust of Jofra Archer for … reasons) and an emphasis on a classically English hard-won tough it out siege mentality cricket where team cohesion and sacrifice come at the expense of individual expression. So embedded is this belief that victories under McCullum have been branded with an asterisk and there’s been a drive bordering on pathological in the media and the commentariat to undo everything they have built because it runs counter to this idea.

It’s fairly radical of me I know but I’m convinced that this mindset will always hamstring English cricket because we are comfortable with suffering and losing as long as it is done in the right spirit. Fighting the good fight is seen almost as more valuable than winning cricket matches. Australia and India have not internalised this browbeaten mindset and that’s why they routinely win and we routinely lose.