England cricket’s team, like the country’s football team, has for much of its modern history found the gap between expectation and reality hard to navigate. Both sides have very often ended falling comically into the abyss. For a country stereotypically portrayed as overbearing, condescending and dismissive, English sporting failures is usually accompanied by a crippling self doubt. In cricket, this may have peaked in the summer of 1988 when the cricket team went through four England captains during one five-test series against the West Indies. It was an era captured by the late great cricket writer Martin Johnson when he…

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