THE PLATEAU BETWEEN TWO PEAKS
As hangovers go, this is a bad one. England look shot. Spent. Burnt out. They have a thick layer of grey fuzz on their tongue, and their bloodshot eyes seem to be sitting above deep, saggy bags of pallid flesh. If Liam Plunkett plays in the next ODI after being whistled over to Australia from the England Lions tour in West Indies he will be the 19th player picked in the space of six matches. Ajmal Shahzad has tweaked his hamstring, Chris Tremlett has a side-strain, Tim Bresnan has a torn calf, Graeme Swann a knacked knee, and Stuart Broad is still working his way back to fitness after his stomach injury. The side seem to have stored up a lot of bad luck during the Test series.
And yet, surprisingly, it is not the bowlers who have been letting the team down. Jonathan Trott aside, the batsmen have made three fifties between them, one apiece for Kevin Pietersen, Andrew Strauss and Matt Prior. Australia may be ranked as the best one-day team in the world, but England have gifted them wickets in this competition. "Twenties and thirties and soft dismissals, that's been plaguing us all the way through this series," admitted Strauss. "And ultimately that's what has lost us the series." Soft dismissals are symptomatic of unfocussed minds. And unfocused minds are untypical of England under Andy Flower and Strauss. These are the knd of bad habits the side were supposed to have shrugged off after their last ODI drubbing by Australiain 2009.
They have been away for over three months now, so it is tempting to diagnose the team as being exhausted and homesick. "Interminable" has become a popular word in the English cricket pages during the last few days. The final match of the tour finishes this Sunday. Exactly 10 days after that they will play a warm-up match against Canada in Fatullah, a schedule that allows them all of three full days at home to recover from the rigours of the winter and readjust from their jetlag. With that kind of break, why bother unpacking at all? Kevin Pietersen said as much this week, griping that "our schedule is ridiculous going into this World Cup. It has been for England teams for a very long time, and that's probably why England have not done well in World Cups." Equally, Kevin, it could just be that they've never been much cop at this format.
Public sympathy will be in short supply. And given that several of England's players have signed up for stints in the Indian Premier League, Pietersen among them, perhaps that's fair enough. Fans who work nine to five don't tend to look too kindly on complaints from cricketers who earn small fortunes to spend months on end playing cricket in warm parts of the world while the rest of us shiver through the English winter. And Strauss, typically, was having none of it anyway. "There's no reason for us to be really fatigued at this stage. We've got a lot of cricket ahead of us. We look after ourselves well and if guys are starting to think about that then that's a dangerous place for us to be." But Strauss himself, of course, was stood down from England's tour to Bangladesh last winter to allow him to build up reserves of energy that would help him stay fresh this winter. And much as he may insist otherwise in public, it seems likely that there will be a few weary and jaded players getting on that plane to India.
Exactly how significant this series defeat is going to be will not be clear until after the World Cup is over. It may just be an aberration, a plateau between twin peaks. As I said last week the team deserve to be judged on what they achieve in the World Cup, not on what has happened in Australia. Their victory in the CB Series in 2007 counted for nothing, after all, when they bombed so badly in the West Indies a few weeks later. And Australia's own patchy performances were soon forgotten when they eased their way to the title without losing a match. But all the same the only momentum England have built up in their run-up has been the kind a train has when it runs off the rails. The odds on their winning the World Cup have been getting longer by the day.
This is the last time England will have to contend with this kind of fixture congestion. The next two Ashes series have been squeezed together so that the team will play 10 Ashes Tests, home and away, in 2013-14. And if they play each other in the world Test championship, that could become 11 straight Test matches. It would have been more sensible, surely, to bring the next series in England forward to 2012. But the thinking is that the Ashes would be compromised by having to compete with the London Olympics. Strange logic this, given that the Olympics only last for three weeks. Still, the decision to readjust the cycle to avoid a clash with the World Cup is the right one, even if the way in which it has been done will inevitably lead to concern about Ashes overkill. The way England are looking we may have to wait till 2015 to find out whether Pietersen was right, or whether he was just whining.
This is an extract taken from The Spin, guardian.co.uk's weekly cricket email. You can sign up here.
