We’re really not surprised that England lost the first T20 yesterday. Judging by the team the England management put out, we can only assume they didn’t actually want to win.

How many teams need three wicket-keepers? It’s ridiculous. Two usually suffices in sixteen man squads for five match test series, so why England needed three for a short T20 match is beyond us.

If you can think of any rationale for such a perplexing strategy, please let us know. We phoned up all the psychiatric units of major hospitals in the London area hoping to talk to Geoff Miller, but we were unsuccessful.

Of course, England’s management will argue – as they surely have to – that Kieswetter, Buttler and Bairstow are three of the best six T20 batsmen in England. Therefore they can justify their bizarre decision on the grounds that all three get into the team as batsmen on merit.

Yeah right. If Andy Flower can say that with a straight face, he’s an even better politician than I first thought.

What made the selection unbelievable was that Alastair Cook, who was one of stars of the recent ODI series was sitting in the stands watching. Although he was originally scheduled to return home after the 50 over stuff, an injury cloud over Ravi Bopara meant that Cook stayed with the squad.

Consequently, Kieswetter, Buttler and Bairstow were all selected ahead of Cook – despite the fact that our ODI skipper had scored his runs at a remarkable strike rate during the previous two weeks.

What’s more the aforementioned youngsters hadn’t faced international class spinners on subcontinent style pitches in their lives. No wonder our middle order folded like the proverbial pack of cards and England lost the game.

Don’t get us wrong. We’re all for giving youngsters a go – but not at the expense of one of our best batsmen. England desperately needed a calm head in yesterday’s game. Pakistan’s batsmen have underperformed throughout this tour, so England were never likely to need a huge total to win.

So why wasn’t Cook playing? Probably because the selectors made Stuart Broad T20 captain last summer, and they didn’t want to undermine his authority by picking Cook in the same side. There’s nothing like compounding one mistake with another, is there.

James Morgan

Kevin pie-eater-sen.  Well, it almost works. I suppose the Pakistani bowlers are pie throwers of sorts (with the exception of Saeed Ajmal of course).

KP’s second century in four days won England the fourth and final ODI on Tuesday. It sealed a 4-0 series whitewash – a result that seemed about as likely as Doug Bollinger winning a modelling contract a couple of weeks ago.

Pietersen’s innings was pure unadulterated class. Unlike his knock at the weekend, when England cruised to victory, this ton was made under the most extreme pressure.

England were 68-4 at one point, and Pakistan’s spinners were closing in for the kill. KP not only withstood this barrage, he also nursed the unsteady Craig Kieswetter through the crisis – and thereafter Samit Patel. It was maturity personified.

Yesterday we saw the Kevin Pietersen that I worried we might never see again. I know people go on about his double hundred last summer, and the one he made in Adelaide, but those runs were made on the flattest pitches imaginable. The bowlers almost had no chance (and they had already been demoralised by earlier events during the series). It was easy pickings.

This time it was a different story. KP moved his feet decisively; he drove the ball through cover magnificently; he flicked rising balls outside off stump to the legside boundary with distain. And what’s more, the old swagger was back.

Neither did KP look like he was going to throw it away. When he’s on song – and batting almost looks too easy for him – Pietersen often gets cocky and gets out to a stupid shot. On this occasion he knuckled down, took responsibility, and resisted the temptation to showboat.

He also paced his innings superbly – picking up singles in the middle overs and then accelerating towards the end.

After the match he described his century as the best ODI innings of his life. It’s certainly hard to think of a better one. Perhaps his hundred in the 2007 World Cup against Australia was sweeter (because of the opposition), but that innings had come when KP was one of the most feared batsmen in the world. This time around, people had been writing him off.

True champions always triumph in adversity – and in this case, KP flamingoed adversity for six.

James Morgan

The woeful form of Kevin Pietersen, who is supposed to be our best batsman (despite the fact he hasn’t looked himself since about 2008) has been one of the most discussed issues of this tour.

When I watched him in the second ODI last week he looked all at sea: his bat wasn’t coming down straight, the spinners were exploiting his penchant for planting his front leg down the crease regardless of a delivery’s line or length, and his confidence looked even lower than his recent batting average.

I really wondered whether his career was on the ropes. In fact, if we had anyone half ready for international cricket in the Lions squad, I might have been tempted to drop him for a while.

That’s why his outstanding hundred on Saturday was so exceptional. It was a total bolt from the blue.

In an interview with Sky last week, KP insisted that nothing was wrong with his game. He claimed he was in brilliant form in the nets, and it was just a matter of time before he scored a biggie.

We all scoffed. Much as I love Pietersen, it can’t be denied that he talks a load of twaddle sometimes; in the very same interview he claimed that he didn’t have a problem with left arm spin.

All the evidence pointed to another KP failure in the third ODI. Even if he survived the new ball, it surely wouldn’t be long before Saeed Ajmal made him look like a pillock again. How wrong we all were.

KP’s innings was brilliant. He seemed to benefit from a more attacking approach – and once he scored a few boundaries his old confidence returned. If only he’d found form earlier. We might have won the test series 2-1 rather than losing it 0-3.

Talking of which, England’s sudden return to form raises all kinds of questions. Is this team finally learning how to play spin? Are we improving in subcontinent style conditions? Where has our recent swagger come from? What would happen if we played Pakistan in another test series starting tomorrow?

My  suspicion is that England would do a lot better if there was a fourth test match after the ODI and T20 series. I don’t think we’d dominate in the same way that we’ve bossed the one day series, but I really think we’d win.

People forget that we only needed an extra 50 runs per innings in each test match and we probably would have won. Recent form suggests that our batsmen are now better placed to score that handful of extra runs. Our bowling takes care of itself – Broad and Anderson have had the wood over the Pakistani batsmen throughout this tour.

So who or what do we blame for the test series debacle? I think the preparation was certainly lacking. Indeed, Andy Flower has admitted as much.

This ODI series suggests that our batsmen have finally adapted. They’re certainly choosing the right balls to hit now – and finding that elusive balance between attack and defence.

The problem is, what else could we have done in terms of preparation? Pakistan will always enjoy a huge advantage over visiting teams when they play in the UAE. The wickets are unique, and there are no first class teams to offer serious opposition in the warm up matches. Is it any coincidence that Pakistan’s recent good run has coincided with their move to Dubai and Abu Dhabi?

Put it this way: what would happen if Pakistan toured Australia next week? Would they show that they’ve improved as a side and compete with the Baggy Greens – or would they get skittled for low totals and lose every match? Remember, this Pakistan team’s batting line-up is as weak as any in recent memory.

I know who my money would be on.

James Morgan

1. Alastair Cook and James Anderson were the pre-eminent batsman and bowler, respectively, in the 2010-11 Ashes. But who was (a) the second-highest run score, and (b) second-highest wicket taker, for England?

2. Who banned one of his bowlers from taking early morning jogs, because they caused him to fall asleep at the bar?

3. No one’s come up with one yet, but if a spinner referred to his ‘chaasra’, what would he mean?

4. Complete this sequence: the white, the off-white, the bone, the ivory…and the what?

5. And complete this sequence: West Indies, West Indies, India, Australia, Pakistan…who?

6. To the nearest fifty runs, what is England’s highest ever total in a test match innings?

7. Which female name would you associate with notable cricket fixtures at Arundel Castle?

8. Which pudding-inspired nickname did Anil Kumble acquire during his county career in England?

9. Which test batting record is held by Courtney Walsh?

10. Of the ten methods of dismissal in cricket, which are the only two never to have occurred in a test match?

England 250-4 (50 overs) beat Pakistan 230 all out, by 20 runs

If you’d told me a month ago that England would get whitewashed in the tests, but lead the subsequent ODI series 2-0, I would have done one of three things. I’d have either punched you in the stomach for wasting my time; reported you to the police for taking illicit narcotics; or suggested politely that you needed psychiatric help.

If you’d gone on to suggest that Alastair Cook – the guy Mike Atherton and others didn’t want in the side – would have scored back to back tons at a strike rate double that of Kevin Pietersen’s, I definitely would have called the men in white coats.

Yet here we are. Could this tour get any more bizarre? Next you’ll be telling me that Ravi Bopara finally looks like proper international batsman …

Our victories in the first two ODIs have been the perfect antidote to our test defeats. I know it’s somewhat hypocritical to go on about them – as we often declare these kind of games irrelevant when we lose them – but they really do signal some positives.

For starters, we can put the debate about Alastair Cook’s role in the ODI side to bed. His captaincy has been sound and his batting an inspiration. He does have some shots in his locker after all. It’s also encouraging because it’s vital to have a captain (in all forms of the game) who can score runs.

Players like Graham Gooch turned into titans when captaining England. Goochie was a good player when he was just one of the boys – but once he was made captain he turned into the batting equivalent of superman. Athers also seemed to score more runs when captain.

Michael Vaughan’s batting, on the other hand, went into terminal decline once he became skipper and slid down the order. He still scored the occasional century – but these were fleeting reminders of his magnificent form as an opener.

Vaughan averaged over fifty at the top of the order (when he was just one of the lads) but only mid-thirties as captain. Consequently, it’s more than reassuring that Cook falls into the first category. In fact, when you consider that he’s likely to lead the test team for years once Strauss retires, it’s bloody marvellous news.

Cook has obviously been the star performer in the first two games – he’s become the only England captain to score successive hundreds in ODIs – but honourable mentions must also go to Steve Finn and ‘Rav Bop’ as J-Lo and Su Bo like to call him.

Finn is looking better and better at the moment. He’s put on a bit of pace (although whether he can keep this up when bowling 20+ overs a day is another matter) and his accuracy seems a little better too.

Put simply, the calls for Finn to earn a test recall are only going to get louder. If you’ve got not faith in Eoin Morgan, and don’t like the look of the alternative batting options, why not simply choose Finn instead? He might contribute more the cause. Personally though, Bresnan is probably still ahead of Finn in the queue. His batting certainly helps.

Ravi Bopara also seems to be blossoming at number four. He looked skittish when he arrived at the crease in the first game, and could easily have been out lbw on one particular occasion, but he eventually found his composure and compiled a useful innings. He played well yesterday too. We’ve seen glimpses of talent from Ravi in the past, so it’s important not to go too over the top about a couple of successful outings, but the signs are certainly good.

So can England win the remaining ODIs and secure their own little whitewash? Stranger things have happened. This magical mystery tour is getting more surreal by the second.

James Morgan

Luckily my brother had a solution, and one which was news to me: watch it on a hookey streaming website. He located one of the many such sites, clicked the mouse, and hey presto – we had the live action from the MCG. Ok, the pictures were a little jerky, but it was cricket all the same – and England were bowling Australia out for 98. What’s not to like?

But as it turns out, it’s a good job that ECB chairman Giles Clarke didn’t gatecrash our cosy little festive cricket party. He’d have given us a right ear-full, and completely ruined the atmos.

That’s because Clarke believes illicit streaming sites are currently the “biggest danger” to the entire game of cricket.

“We all have to be vigilant,”  he said in an interview last month. “There are a huge number of pirate websites that stream cricket on the internet taken from television broadcasts, we and our broadcasters closed down 700 during last summer’s series against India.

“These pirate broadcasters are the biggest danger to cricket because they take money out of the game without commercial benefit to the sport. It is an extremely complex procedure to close down websites but it can be done and has to be done.”

What an insult. What arrogance. What complete bollocks.

Think of threats to cricket, and what comes to mind? Match fixing. Low test match attendances. Fixture overkill. Or in England, parlous county finances and the dearth of international-quality players who didn’t learn their cricket either at private school, or in South Africa.

None of those matter to Clarke. As far as he’s concerned, the biggest danger to cricket is – people watching cricket. How dare  you fans watch England play – don’t you know the damage you’re doing! It reminds you of that classic quote from the film Dr Strangelove. ‘You can’t fight in here – this is the war room!’

Clarke will never shut down these sites – they’re too popular. Millions of cricket fans in England and around the world don’t have the means to purchase premium channels. I know from your correspondence that quite a few of you – TFT readers – use these services yourselves. The incentives for those who run them are so much more powerful than those of the people whose job it is to police them. The ECB are wasting their time.

It doesn’t occur to Giles Clarke that the majority of punters who visit streaming sites do so because they either can’t afford, or aren’t prepared, to fork out for Sky. Or maybe they’re just watching at work. Either way, Sky aren’t losing out, because it’s not money they would have had in the first place.

Neither is he struck by a fairly obvious point – the inverse of his prophecy. What danger is posed to cricket by people not watching it at all, especially children, because it’s no longer on free-to-air TV.

The ECB aren’t very interested in any of that, because they’re too busy tending to the interests of their BSkyB paymasters, hence the outburst over hookey websites. Last month, Sky’s £260 million deal for exclusive live cricket rights was renewed for another three years, up to 2017. The BBC – unforgivably – didn’t even bother bidding. If we’re being realistic, cricket will never again be on proper TV – and could presumably go the same way as rugby league or boxing: insular and marginalised.

According to Nick Hoult of the Daily Telegraph:

“There is now a general acceptance that the ECB has to maximise its revenue from live broadcast rights, a source of income which keeps county cricket afloat and funds Team England as well as grass roots programmes.”

General acceptance by who? The fans and supporters who actually have to pay for it? No one asked us. Hoult means the professional cricketing cognoscenti – the network of journalists, insiders and mandarins who set the agenda but sometimes fail to see things from the perspective of ordinary punters.

Where the hell does all this money go? We’re talking here about £87 million a year. Much of it is used to prop up loss-making county clubs, often subsidising their expensive overseas imports and swanky new stands which they built to host a test match once every three years.  As for Team England – no one’s begrudging the players a decent wedge, but you can’t help suspecting there are plenty of people you’ve never heard of, behind the scenes, who are doing rather nicely out of all this, thank you very much.

The part that really grates is the ‘grass roots’ – an arch appeal to our emotions, and an act of gross deception by the ECB. Where is the money? Have you seen it? Are public cricket facilities being upgraded or built, such as park grounds? Are there grants available for village or wandering clubs? Are state school children – in meaningful numbers – getting access to cricket? No. Most of the cash goes to elite league clubs, who need it the least, and whose colts are already integrated into serious competitive cricket.

What would happen without the Sky money? Would we stop watching or playing cricket? The ECB predict Armageddon. In reality life would carry on as normal, only with fewer trebles all round at the top table.

In 2009, an independent review led by David Davies, the former FA  executive, recommended that we should at least get the Ashes for free: the idea was to list it among the sporting events which must be available on regular television. That was before the last general election; the Conservative party opposed the idea and after forming the new government in 2010 formally shelved the plan until 2013. The Ashes will remain wholly in Sky’s hands for the time being.

Funny that, when you consider the fallout from the phone hacking scandal and what we learnt about collusion between the Tories and Rupert Murdoch’s companies. The Sun switched their support to David Cameron, and by an extraordinary coincidence, his party pledged not to endanger Sky’s cricketing monopoly. As ever in English cricket, the only thing which matters is political expediency and the personal interests of the people in charge. The supporters? Sorry. Keep buying the tickets, though.

You might say that by this stage I’m sounding as in the grip of a wildly delusional conspiracy theory. But as the old saying goes – just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

Maxie Allen

If I had a quid for every fan who thinks England should drop a couple of batsmen after the debacle against Pakistan, I’d have enough money to set up my own television channel, re-employ Tony Lewis and Jack Bannister, and put live test cricket back on terrestrial TV. In a way, I can understand where these people are coming from: they see Bell and Pietersen struggling to pick Saeed Ajmal’s doosra and they want blood.

There’s just one problem with this rather knee jerk response. Who exactly do they want to replace these stalwarts who have served England so well? Perhaps they’d prefer someone from the England Lions – the next generation of batsmen who are allegedly poised to conquer the world.

Well, I’ll you a little bit about these up and coming superstars. With the exception of Somerset’s Jos Buttler, none of them are any good. Why else do you think England are persevering with the likes of Ravi Bopara – a batsman similar to Mark Ramprakash and Graeme Hick in temperament, but with approximately half their talent. I’m afraid, ladies and gentlemen, the cupboard is bare. That’s why Eoin Morgan, a guy who was elevated to the test team despite averaging just 36 in first class cricket, can’t seem to get dropped.

If you don’t believe what I’m saying, look up the scorecard from the recent warm up match between the Lions and the senior side. Strauss’ men hadn’t played limited overs cricket since September. The Lions, on the other hand, had been playing 50 over cricket for a few weeks – so the young guns had a distinct advantage. Or so you would have thought …

What actually happened is this: the Lions batted first were routed for under a hundred. In fact, their efforts were so dismal that the senior side set themselves an artificial score in excess of 230 to chase, just so they’d get a little more practice in the middle. How utterly humiliating.

I’m not denying that there are some talented young batsmen in England. The likes of Johnny Bairstow and Ben Stokes undoubtedly have great hand-eye coordination – and one day they might make class batsmen. But those days are in the distant future.

Let’s look a little closer at Lions line-up. First of all there’s Joe Root, the 21 year old from Yorkshire that everyone seems to rave about. The reality is that he’s scored just one hundred in 18 first class matches and averages 35. That’s hardly England material.

Then there’s Craig Kieswetter, or ‘Mr Biffer’ as I call him. Kieswetter possibly has a future in the one-day arena (maybe) but he hardly possesses the technical prowess capable of withstanding top class spin. If the bowling is good, biffers usually get found out.

The next cab off the rank is Alex Hales, the 23 year old from Notts who has already played T20 cricket for England. Many judges consider Hales to be the best legitimate prospect from the Lion’s line-up. Again the statistics suggest otherwise. He has scored a pretty measly four hundreds in 35 first class games. The Aussies must be shaking in their boots.

Finally there’s James Taylor, who has just left Leicestershire to enhance his England prospects. Of all the young batsmen in the country, Taylor is the most highly rated. He also has by far the most impressive first class record. Despite being just 22 years old, Taylor has scored ten hundreds and averages almost fifty. Sounds promising eh? Well, unfortunately he’s not quite there yet. Taylor had a miserably 2011 for this county (scoring just one hundred). Now is not the time to promote him.

The truth of the matter is that whilst England have quality backup seam bowlers coming out of their ears – Onions, Tremlett, Dernbach and Shahzad  have all done a decent job for England – the batting reserves are as thin as they’ve been in perhaps twenty or thirty years.

We might laugh at Usman Khawaja and Sean Marsh’s recent struggles, and scoff at David Warner’s recent achievements (he does, after all, makes Craig KIeswetter’s style of batting look sophisticated), but the truth of the matter is that England aren’t any better off.

I suppose our message to the boo boys who want Bell and Pietersen thrown to the lions is this: the England Lions simply aren’t very good. They lost last month’s ODI series against Bangladesh ‘A’ 3-2. Anyone who thinks they might have done well against Saeed Ajmal and Pakistan – when they couldn’t even master Bangladesh’s reserves – is living in fantasy land.

James Morgan

The whole thing was an unmitigated disaster Every now and again a series comes along which you just know from the outset will be a complete nightmare. Everything which can go wrong, will go wrong – as we witnessed in the Emirates.

One to wipe from the memory banks It’s best to pretend it was all a bad dream, as our opponents  tend to do when fortunes are reversed. You rarely hear Pakistan supporters reminiscing about the 3-1 thrashing we meted out in 2010. As someone once explained to me, the 2006/7 Ashes never actually took place: it was all filmed on a sound stage in the Nevada desert.

It was too bloody early in the morning 6.00am is the worst possible time for a day’s cricket to begin, especially when your side is losing. You wake up in a panic, check the score on your phone through bleary eyes, see how many wickets England have lost, and then kick the cat. What an awful way for the day begin – and it’s only downhill from there.

We didn’t get any work done I suppose this applies to many series, but during this one, with play continuing till lunchtime in the UK, no England supporter achieved anything in the office before 2pm. The Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates a £50 billion hit to the national economy as a result of employees across the land clicking refresh on Cricinfo rather than doing what they were actually paid for. And all this despite our losing. No matter how bad it got, you couldn’t take your eye off it – rather like a car crash.

It wasn’t on TV Well, it was on Sky, but for those who can’t afford / their spouses have banned premium sports channels, there was zilch, riens, FA. No highlights programmes on terrestrial TV. Instead, one had to make do with clips on the news, the odd bit on You Tube, or the radio, whose coverage was sorely compromised by the inclusion of Henry Blofeld. Why they insist on hiring a commentator who knows almost nothing about cricket, keeps getting the score wrong, and whose enlightening observations included the recent lack of rain (in a desert), remains a mystery.

The team got a lot of stick If you’re a proper England supporter you rarely get angry when the side is outplayed – you just feel sad. And you take it personally. Criticism of the players feels like criticism of you – as if the pundits are scolding you – because as a follower, you and the team are just different parts of the same entity. Particularly hurtful was the notion that our batsmen foundered on their arrogance – believing their own hype, they took success for granted. That just doesn’t ring true. The batsmen tried their best but lost their nerve, due to technical failings and lack of match practice.

The bowlers did well A separate ‘reason to be cheerful’, perhaps. Anderson and co dismissed Pakistan on all five possible occasions, never conceding 400 – a tremendous effort on those pitches with no mystery spinner. They twice earned us a first innings lead. Monty’s comeback was a triumph, and Broad has finally become the bowler we were promised. Whether this makes our defeat better or worse – we still bowled like world champions / a wasted effort which will cause resentment in the dressing room – well, I just don’t know

Maxie Allen

Put the razorblades down everyone. Although England might have suffered the ignominy of having the shortest possible reign as world No.1 (it doesn’t get much shorter than one series does it) there are actually reasons to be cheerful.

Even though our former colonies are currently revelling in our miserable defeat to Pakistan (haven’t these bitter sad cases got anything better to do?) things could be a lot, lot worse. In fact, I can’t think of the last time a 0-3 drubbing produced so many positives.

Let’s forget the drama and disappointment and look at things objectively. We’ve always known that English batsmen are fallible against spin. So what’s new? I’ll tell you what: the fact that our bowling attack has proven itself to be potent in any conditions. Taking twenty wickets is half the battle.

But isn’t the batting a bit of a worry going forward? Well, no it isn’t actually. I don’t blame our batsmen for performing so badly. How many mystery spinners had they faced before? And how many spinners in world cricket are as good as Saeed Ajmal? None.

The good news is that Ajmal is 34 years old. He can’t have long left in the game – and there’s always the chance that the ICC will grow a pair and ban him. I doubt we’ll face him in a test match on the subcontinent again. So what have we got to worry about?

People say we’ll struggle in Sri Lanka and India but they’re wrong. Sri Lanka don’t have a decent spinner to speak of; Herath is decent, but he’s no better than Swann or Panesar – and crucially, he’s doesn’t bowl a doosra.

Ditto India. Ashwin might cause us a few problems, but not to the same extent.

In my opinion, Ajmal was the difference between the sides in both Dubai and Abu Dhabi. It was always going to extremely difficult to combat a mystery spinner in his own backyard – especially now that the DRS has turned umpires into trigger happy vampires.

I’ve heard loads of people argue that the orthodox Rehman did just as much damage, but don’t you believe it. It was Ajmal who undermined our confidence and got inside our heads. We played Rehman quite comfortably in the end.

Once batsmen get used to the ball turning one way survival is much easier – ask Younis Khan and Azhar Ali. England would have won the series if Ajmal was on our side. Our batsmen have scored runs against orthodox spinners around the world quite comfortably. This isn’t going to change now.

What’s more, England were at a huge disadvantage before the series even started. We hadn’t played any first class cricket for four months, and we went into the first test without any meaningful warm up games (it’s kind of hard when no first class teams play in the UAE).

Pakistan, on the other hand, were battle hardened and waiting for us. We’ll let them enjoy their moment. We hammered them in 2010 remember, so they can hardly claim they’re a better side. Home advantage is crucial. Furthermore, the margins of defeat in the second and third tests were actually quite small. Don’t forget that we earned first innings leads in both these games. It wasn’t like we weren’t competitive.

The only thing this whitewash really proves is that England are not the world’s number one team. But who is? Nobody. We knew that a year ago. So what?

Cyberspace is full of gloating Aussies, Indians and Pakistanis (most of them probably Javed Miandad in disguise) relishing the fact that England cannot claim to be the new Australia, or the new West Indies.

Well fellas, I’ve got some news for you. We never claimed to be world beaters – or heralded the arrival of a new era of English dominance. We simply won a lot of matches, thrashed Australia down under, and found ourselves top of a contrived rankings table.

World No1 wasn’t a title we bestowed on ourselves. English arrogance, when it comes to cricket anyway, is all in your minds. We actually feel a lot more comfortable when England lose. It’s what we grew up with. It’s what we know.

So there.

James Morgan

Pakistan (99 and 365) beat England (141 and 252) by 71 runs

You wait more than a year for an England defeat in a test match, and then three come along at once. So how did our team transform themselves from world-beaters into a fleet of London buses? And have we been watching an aberration – a mere blip – or is this the shape of things to come?

The sheer scale of our defeat has yet to really sink in. Three-nil, for goodness sake, a scoreline absolutely no one envisaged, from the most bullish Pakistani to pessimistic Englishman. It’s all a brutal shock to the senses. We were hammered, humiliated, and beaten into the dust – the kind of treatment we can only remember getting from Australia.

Five years have elapsed since our last whitewash, Down Under in 2006/7. Apart from West Indies in the 1980s, it’s only ever been Australia who’ve really taken us to the cleaners, never the likes
of Pakistan. Even in series they dominated, we usually managed to get at least a draw somewhere, and that was with teams less talented than our current XI. We are world champions at the moment, remember.

So it’s all been very bewildering. The obvious reaction – as an England supporter – is this: it was all too good to be true. The last two years have been a ridiculous dream from which we have just been abruptly woken up. England could never carry on being so good. We’re England, after all. We lose – that’s how cricket works. The whole world-number-one business, meanwhile, was a cruel trick designed purely to taunt and torture us. The cricketing gods snatched away our toy before we’d barely had time to play with it.

An optimist might view this series as a reality check for England; it’ll give the players a healthy kick up the bottom. In the long term it might prove to have been beneficial – by providing experience, perspective, and motivation to put matters right. Our bowling was superb throughout – it was still good during Pakistan’s second innings, despite the fatigue of three back-to-back tests – and the hugely successful return of Monty Panesar ranks as a massive positive.

The problem lies in the reason we lost: batsmen out of form and confidence. How can they get better before the Sri Lanka series in six weeks’ time? Crises of confidence usually get worse. What began as uncertainty against spin could fester and spread into the batsmen’s whole games – think of Bell’s dismissal today against Gul. Dale Steyn will have been watching with interest.

We used to think of our top order as being a fragile lot, because they were – even during the 2009 Ashes victory and 2009/10 South Africa tour. Apart from Morgan for Collingwood, the personnel remain the same today. Perhaps they will always be fragile, and merely had a purple patch for a couple of years in the middle. Or might they be flat-track bullies, only fluent against popgun attacks on familiar wickets?

The only short-term solution is dropping Morgan for Bopara, which inspires about as much hope as the start of a Nick Knight commentary spell. Essentially, we are replacing one soft-headed failure (whose technique is poor) with another one. Bopara is exactly the opposite of what we need right now – a street fighter. Anyone got Graham Thorpe’s number?

And what about the bowlers? How on earth must they feel to have lost 3-0 after playing out of their skins for the last three weeks? It would only be human nature for their heads to drop and their morale flag – you can only give so much in a losing cause, especially when the batsmen’s failures have put so much pressure on you.

Then again, a series like this reminds you not only how fascinating test cricket can be, but how tight the margins are. Had we avoided that calamitous hour in the Abu Dhabi run-chase, we would probably have won the series 2-1. If you take a more global perspective, and look at test results generally, over the last couple of years, England’s debacle in the Gulf doesn’t seem quite so ghastly.

This is an era with no dominant side, when home advantage is proving critical, fortunes rapidly fluctuate, and strange things happen all the time. Heroes become zeroes overnight and then back again. India, cocks of the walk only last July, have since lost eight consecutive tests away but are still a powerhouse at home. Australia were bowled out for 47 by South Africa and beaten at home by New Zealand, but now everyone thinks they’re good again. If Pakistan had played like we have of late, they’d get called ‘mercurial’. Because we’re England, everything seems worse.

Maxie Allen