This latest defeat exposes the poverty in English Test cricket but it is possible to resist the decline, starting with bringing to account those overseeing it
Chris Silverwood is taking the positives. Chris Silverwood was expecting this. Chris Silverwood has found, squinting through his Victorian eyeglass, something to build on here.
Watching Silverwood’s deeply weird performance in front of the cameras at the end of the third Ashes Test in Melbourne – batting away concerns, wincing in the sun, and wearing throughout the pitying smile of a man who knows that all of this is simply another stage in the vast, unknowable masterplan of Chris Silverwood – it was hard not to worry a little about England’s head coach; to search in vain for the line between nightmarishly bad media training and a man so embedded within the blue Lycra bubble he really has lost sight of the disaster unfolding around him.