Why was the cupboard of the cricket empty in winters
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Horsham this week whilst England will hope to be starting the process of defeating South Africa, who are missing Dale Steyn but assisted instead by an eager Andre Nel. The superior team won at Headingley but it will be a surprise if Michael Vaughan does not take his opportunity to lead a personal and team fightback that would set up a potentially thrilling decider at The Oval.
Those of us keeping an eye on things from a distance can reflect in relative peace on weightier events elsewhere. Two things in particular need careful monitoring. The first of them, the latest twists in the high-octane drama of Twenty20 politics - the Champions this and the Champions that, or Giles this and Lalit that - may be left to others for the moment. From the English perspective, however, this is a crucial time both for an international squad swimming with wealth and for the dwindling pool of England-qualified journeymen labouring to join them from county cricket.
The controversial selection of Darren Pattinson at Leeds, and England's thorough trouncing, brought the relationship between the two groups into question once more. It needs to be reiterated that England lost not because Ryan Sidebottom was unfit, nor because the inclusion of both Pattinson and Andrew Flintoff inevitably altered the chemistry of the team. They lost primarily because they batted without the necessary discipline in the first innings.
Vaughan is good at deceiving himself about his personal ability to attract unplayable balls and he, especially, following three rather isolated hundreds in 30 innings since his post-Ashes return last year, needs a major innings this weekend to re-establish his authority. He has done it before, notably at Old Trafford in 2005 and at Headingley in 2007.
For any team, success in cricket requires a subtle alloy of several ingredients, of which good leadership is one. The others include talented batsmen, bowlers, fielders and wicketkeepers, naturally. Less obvious essentials are luck, total commitment to the team above the individual, hard work and practice, concentration on the needs of the moment, and focus on team success rather than the individual rewards that success will bring.
Remembering all this may yet bring England back into the current tough Test series with South Africa and on towards a winning series in India in the winter, surely the next essential step towards revenge for their utter humiliation at the hands of what, admittedly, was a genuinely great Australia side in 2006-07. But two uncomfortable truths were fully exposed at Headingley: one, the failure of application in the batting, the other a matter of selection policy that reflected weakness in the governance of the English game.
On the field England are gravely short of depth when it comes to two of the essential playing departments. There is a dearth both of top-class batsmen and of spinners, so that a consistently inconsistent top six lacks sufficient challenge from beneath; and there is no serious left-arm spin bowling alternative to Monty Panesar. Graeme Swann or James Tredwell would presumably be next in line if Panesar were to injure himself on the eve of a Test match, but neither is likely to be a match-winner except on a genuine spinner's pitch. Adil Rashid has struggled, generally speaking, this season, and the only young offspinner of special talent is Ollie Rayner, whose chance has come at last because of Saqlain Mushtaq's return to Surrey and Mushtaq Ahmed's knee injuries.
Rayner, six-foot-five, and a useful batsman too, will be a key figure, no doubt, in Sussex's match against Somerset at Horsham but his recent success, like Pattinson's selection, has reopened the debate about qualification rules. Reasonable defence of a national sport's interests should have allowed the ECB to impose restraints on the number of overseas-bred players in cricket that would have stood the test of European law. Now that the Cotonou Agreement has been interpreted by the EU, under French presidency, as applying to the trade of goods and services rather than labour, it remains to be seen with what resolve the board will force the hand of counties to stop the inflow of cricketers from overseas. At the moment they are getting wholly different signals from their leaders because of the obsession with Twenty20.
Two uncomfortable truths were fully exposed at Headingley: one, the failure of application in the batting, the other a matter of selection policy that reflected weakness in the governance of the English game