Discomfited England must tread carefully

Records that defined the Duncan Fletcher era have continued to tumble in the ten months since he concluded his eight year tenure as England coach. For the first time in six years, a Test series was lost at home, which, as it did then but never again under Fletcher, brought about consecutive series defeats. New Zealand was Fletcher's next port of call after an honourable 1-0 reverse in India with a weakened squad had followed the habitual Ashes thrashing in the summer of 2001. And with Peter Moores' side having failed to win a single Test over two three-match series with India and Sri Lanka, cricket's cyclical calendar has provided him with the self-same means of stopping the rot. England shared the spoils back in 2002, a scoreline which will not be much help to captain and coach in repeated in the forthcoming series.

The task Moores has been struggling with over the best part of a year in charge is a different one from that which Fletcher successfully negotiated in the first half of his spell. The problem is less a deep legacy of mismanagement and poor results, more the shadow of tangible recent success: people find it hard to comprehend how the current team, with many of the constituent parts of what was not so long ago a brilliantly successful Test team, has none of the collective power which defined that unit. Perhaps Moores' inheritance was a more significantly tainted one than acknowledged at the time: he took over a team on the slide, engaged in an 18 month decline from its highest peak. Such a trend has been long in the acceptance, with the recent results that crytallised the reality ensuring much of the fall-out has affected Moores.

In fairness, England were unfortunate in the extreme to be denied a victory in the Lord's Test against India last July. Since then, however, they have not looked like winning a match, particularly worrying the manner in which they have often slipped so quickly from contention. Many factors have contributed, but there is a bottom line and it points to the twenty opposition wickets England have been failing to take. Bowling and the beefy five-man attack formed the main plank on which Michael Vaughan and Fletcher built the successful team of 2004-5. Not one of those five remain the same force as before, even if the old opening pair will line up for the first Test at Hamilton on Wednesday. Hoggard has been unlucky with injuries over the last 12 months and could yet return to his peak; the much greater worry is Harmison. Before every Test series the story with England's fastest bowler is the same. Whether he has been playing cricket for his county, adopted South African franchsie or none at all, he turns up for practice games and bowls with neither the control or penetration required for top-level cricket. The England management rally and insist that, with some overs "in his legs", he will recover his increasingly elusive cutting edge. But Harmison is increasingly proving himself the bowling equivalent of the National Health Service, a bottomless pit into which resources, care and attention are poured lovingly but to no end. England are going so far to accomodate and carry him that it appears he has lost the ability to make a step of his own and it is possible that only a complete severance from the current amniotic catharsis will have the desired effect. Another insipid series here might well persuade the selectors that they have no option.

Andrew Strauss has been the other contentious member of the squad; for many, nothing had changed since he was justifiably dumped at the end of last year. But Strauss is clearly someone whom England are desperate to have back in the side and his is a selection made with the next three years or so in mind. England have seen the way that the loss of cornerstone presences - Trescothick, Giles, Vaughan, Flintoff - has affected the team post-2005 and evidently they feel that Strauss was one they could not simply let slip away. It is harsh on Owais Shah, perpetually supplanted as first reserve, but if Strauss makes a successful return and is scoring runs against South Africa next summer, England's selectors will be heralded for a piece of pragmatic, long term thinking. Now headed by David Graveney's ex-lieutenant Geoff Miller, who favoured Strauss for the captaincy in Australia, the selectors probably at heart see him as Michael Vaughan's natural successor too.

Every new series for England seems to bring with it the need to consolidate, find a position from where they can begin to track progress. Eventually that becomes rock bottom, which arguably was Duncan Fletcher's starting point. New Zealand, although shown by results to be a poor Test side, will nevertheless present a threat to England, with the one-day series ample evidence that success is not to be taken for granted, even if New Zealand tend only to be a real danger when in the all-black kit of their fabled rugby team. Nevertheless, they are more than capable of wielding the knife if England continue to show the disorientation and lack of killer insticnt which has typified their recent Test performances. England need the desire and determination which can only come with realisation of their current standing; no longer can they maintain the pretence that they are suffering from a particularly nasty migraine. New Zealand stand ready to exploit weaknesses if displayed: the ambush is an easy one for England to fall prey to and the trapdoor gapes wide open.