Ashes to ashes

Is it really four years since the most memorable Test series of the modern era took place when England, against all the odds, beat the best side in the world 2-1 on a final dramatic day at The Oval?

A lot has happened since then, most notably the retirement of some of Australia's greatest cricketers. Gone are Shane Warne, Glenn McGrath, Adam Gilchrist and Matthew Hayden which would normally leave the impression that England's chances will have improved.

However, it has not exactly been smooth sailing for England and the players come into the English summer with a lot to prove.

Since that dramatic day when cricket stole the headlines from football for a whole summer they have lost 5-0 to the old enemy in a fiasco of a tour and recently were beaten by an average West Indies side in the Caribbean.

This is not a side in top form and the sacking of Kevin Pietersen has not helped the mood either. Add the IPL issues, central contracts and injuries, not to mention chaos surrounding the ECB's involvement with Stanford, and the picture looks far from promising.

Before the Ashes start there is the small matter of a two-Test series against West Indies who are filling in for Sri Lanka who could not complete the fixture as their players were at the IPL. The ECB are linked with Sky to provide seven Test matches each summer and in a desperate scramble they managed to sort out this two-match series with a country they have just toured.

Today's first match at Lords will be followed next week by a Test at the Riverside and because of the low-key nature of the build-up - Chris Gayle only returned from the IPL on Monday - it is being seen purely as a warmup for the big Ashes event.

England teams have suffered from the problems associated with building sides for one-off successes as this ultimately is simply often the case of putting all your eggs in one basket. In football it was always the major championships and with cricket it has always been the Ashes or World Cup. This has provided both authorities with not only an unrealistic aim; it has also been a convenient excuse for when things are not going well in the interim.

Under Fabio Capello the England football team has managed to move away from this mindset as the Italian sees every game as important, unlike his predecessors, and therefore, there is a momentum building up which is an essential quality for major success.

Under Clive Woodward the winning World Cup England rugby team were virtually unbeatable leading up to that tournament and his maxim of only winning the next game was proved to be entirely justified.

The men at the ECB may well try and take note of the progress elsewhere in the sporting world as they still appear to be operating in a vacuum where the reality of what we see on the pitch does not match the positive spin on the rhetoric we hear from them.

The one-day side is still as poor as it ever was with absolutely no prospect of winning a World Cup; even the Twenty20 this summer on home ground looks like it might turn out to be a complete embarrassment.

As for the Test side, well that is another work in progress with Ian Bell having been jettisoned for Ravi Bopara and a bowling attack that would not strike fear into many top international sides. Steve Harmison has finally been dropped and any thoughts of the Ashes line up being back together are thankfully now history. That five-match series was a one-off performance but the ECB have held on to the dream for far too long of playing them all together again and English cricket has suffered accordingly.

The media will pounce on the team, if and when they do not reach the expectations promised, but I would be more than happy to see the team lose as long as a medium- and long-term strategy could be seen to be taking place.

Cricket is a team sport but individual performances are central to success and the more one man is expected to do more than one job the more likely success will allude them at the top level.

Only the very few - Botham, Sobers, Hadlee and Kapil Dev among them - have managed to combine more than one role and there is no one in England who currently fits that bill.

If selectors and team keep things simple they may well not win all the major prizes they hoped for but at least they would look like a team again .... which is something that has not been the case since that summer four years ago.