The ECB could do much worse than rotate the head coach out of Test cricket and appoint someone such as Nasser Hussain or Alec Stewart to promote the red-ball game
The real problem, in the end, was how little it seemed to be a problem. As England’s cricketers prodded their way to a strangely immobile 58 all out in Auckland, the Test team’s lowest ever first innings score on a covered pitch, the TV cameras kept flitting around in search of some defining note of crisis, settling with a sense of declining interest on the mild, untroubled face of Trevor Bayliss.
There it was again, the Bayliss face, looming beneath that leathery white hat. And still conveying through this historically dark moment for the national summer sport all the savage, rage-filled intensity of a papier-mache-covered balloon plonked propped up inside an England tracksuit and decorated with an expression of polite, arm’s-length concern.
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