Cook seems to have got Strauss’s disease – an inability to set an attacking field and respond to situations in any other than a purely formulaic way. The usual advice is, if you win the toss on a flat, docile pitch like Headingley on Friday, BAT FIRST!! Fill your boots and make the other lot play catch up later! Malinga can only bowl 10 overs after all. Also, ANDERSON SHOULD ALWAYS HAVE AT LEAST ONE SLIP. He’s a swing bowler and it broke my heart yesterday at Lord’s to see edges go for 4 at third man that would have been down first or second slip’s throat.

My long experience with cricket teams I have coached and managed (sceptics see correspondence with Martin De Kauwe elsewhere) also taught me the following: if you’ve batted first and made a low score, the only way open to you to win is to get the other lot all out. There are no draws in limited over cricket. This means attacking bowling and fields to match. After all, a batsman who is out can’t score any more runs, can he? As it was Cook got it plain wrong at Headingley and at Lord’s – Sri Lanka were never really under any pressure at all.

What to do about it? Put out an A team for the next two matches to win the series. This means dropping Broad and Kieswetter (and perhaps Trott), bringing back Prior and either Finn or Tremlett in Broad’s place as a bowler or another spinner to complement Swann – and look for a captain with some tactical nouse! Why does no-one think of Bell?

So why are we alone apparently determined to adopt iconography in sport which pretends that the UK does not exist and which creates the strong impression that it is only a matter of time before its dissolution?

Next year it seems we are to have the ultimate farce. We stage the Olympics in which local particularisms are blissfully not indulged in this way. Football is an Olympic sport and Britain gave the game to the world – yet no British team will compete for a medal in our own country because the officials who promote and perpetuate the pernicious practice of having four separate ‘national’ teams will not agree to a single national team to play in British colours under the British flag. Who knows, if they did, it might even win the Gold! And then a British team might get further than the quarter finals in the World Cup. Now wouldn’t that be something?

However he will need determination, as will his colleagues who, I hope, think like him. Alex will be back!!

At a time when Labour’s ruinous devolution policy has placed the future of the UK in greater question than at any time since 1746, the Union needed just such a shot in the arm. We didn’t care who was Scottish, who was Welsh, who English or from Northern Ireland – they were all ours under our common flag and our national anthem.

So why are these athletes being welcomed to Cardiff draped, not in the Union Flag under which they competed, but in Welsh flags instead? No celebration of Britishness there!! On the TV coverage I saw one solitary person in the crowd waving a Union Flag. All the rest had either brought – or been issued with – Welsh flags instead. And the asinine BBC commentator person even went so far as to refer to one athlete as ‘winning Wales’s first gold medal since (whenever)’. How long before the arch-showman Salmond stages a similar Nationalist/Separatist rally in Edinburgh? And will London 2012 still have a TeamGB supported by Union Flag waving supporters as in Beijing? After all it was only thanks to the Chinese authorities’ concerns about pro-Tibet demonstrations that flags of ‘non-competing nations’ were banned and we were spared a rash of saltires etc. there.

Not surprisingly Brown has been caught napping here. We are told there is to be a celebration for the British Team in London in NOVEMBER! By which time the devolved administrations will have had loads of time to undo the good work for the Union that might have been achieved by staging their own celebrations such as this, with their own separatist message.

Why am I banging on about this? After all, it’s just symbolism, isn’t it, with no real substance? Simply because I am worried about the future of the country I grew up in. Basically, I want it to have a future. And because I realise, as do the Alex Salmonds of this world, that symbolism is important. It creates the atmosphere in which what was unthinkable thirty or forty years ago becomes thinkable even to the point of seeming to some people right and inevitable.

I remember Wales and Scotland in the 1960s when dragon flags and saltires were relatively rare. Now they’re just about ubiquitous and the rarity is the Union Flag.

The first few days at Lord’s went like GB’s honeymoon period. The opposition attack failed to penetrate. We built up a massive score, then skittled them out cheaply and made them follow on. This was the equivalent of GB’s first few weeks in office – all sunshine all the way, Tories nowhere. Then Gordon declined to bat (hold an election) and Michael postponed England’s second innings – and everything changed. Since then nothing has gone right for either man and the individual performance of each has been weak – neither has scored.

Vaughan has done what many hope Brown will do – fallen on his sword to make way for another man and ‘be himself again’. The problems created are similar: who will succeed? In the case of GB there are a number of options, none of whom appetise. In the case of Vaughan, some see an obvious successor in Kevin Pietersen.

Thirty years or so ago Michael Brearley gave up the captaincy and the powers that be had the brilliant idea of appointing our brilliant all-rounder Ian Botham. Disaster for both Ian and England, retrieved only part way through the 1981 Ashes series when Botham was replaced as captain by Brearley – and went on to win what is still called ‘Botham’s Ashes’. They repeated the error after Vaughan gave up through injury in 2006 by appointing Freddie Flintoff – again disaster for both. I suspect that KP will suffer likewise if appointed. There is an alternative in Andrew Strauss who led England successfully against Pakistan two years ago. It might also be worth considering Paul Collingwood after his gutsy 135 at Edgbaston – a ‘captain’s innings’ if ever I saw one.

And a replacement for GB? Bring back Blair? Or a Blair clone like Milliband? Certainly not! Let’s have an election and let the (s)electors choose. I’d go for Cameron myself – now isn’t that a surprise???