With an Ashes defeat behind them those members of the England and Wales cricket team who play short form white ball cricket are off for T20 games against Sri Lanka and then the T20 World Cup in India and Sri Lanka.
The management team of Rob Key and Brendan McCullum remain in place not least because there is no time to change them. McCullum has been criticised for a laidback coaching style leading to a drinking culture (some might think that this is one of the great traditions of English cricket) and a lack of preparation combined with a one-dimensional strategic approach.
However (and I owe to the point to a throw away remark in the Observer- ‘now is the time of monsters’ which is the alternative translation from the Italian for ‘morbid symptoms’) to the real issue is that other teams have worked out the Bazball approach and how to defeat it. However England currently have no replacement strategy..
While there are references to Gramsci and football there is absolutely no evidence that he was interested in or knew anything about cricket. His words which sum up a crisis in capitalism are however also apt for the crisis in English cricket.
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear., Gramsci, Prison Notebooks
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