What are the good points we can salvage from Bazball?

McCullum's regime may be unravelling but among its many flaws there are positives England can keep

- Barney. Ronay

Overprepared. Overconfident. Overblown. Over there. And now just over. We know how this goes from here, don’t we?

We know this cycle. The days since England’s defeat in Brisbane have boiled down to a real-time competition to become the hate-click boss, to describe in the most sensual, eviscerating detail the depth of England’s badness - not just at cricket, but at the molecular, existential level.

Right now everything is turned up to 11. Bring on the flamethrowers. Scour this filth from the earth. It’s time to burn this Baz-house down. So we have pitch maps of shame, fifth-stump drive montages, deconstructions of the basic energy at the Gabba, when even the players’ faces seemed to collapse, from handsome, alpha dogs romping out in mid-afternoon, to weak-chinned lost souls under the evening lights, eyes hollow, hair straggly, like acid casualties at Woodstock.

We have arace to capture the exact styling of the end times. What willits epitaph be? The current favourite is Brendon McCullum’s post-match TV interview, an experience that felt, in the moment, like having burning hot kebab skewers made entirely from vibes and golf driven into both eyeballs. Evens he said the thing - “If anything we overprepared” - you could almost hear the clank of belts being loosed, steak knives sharpened. There it is. His we need to look at the data. His peace in our time. His we’re ALL RIGHT, fist raised to the party conference hall.

So we can do the horror. But there is rarely any suggestion of what to do next, or what parts to keep, just the urge to purge, to annihilate the dominant thesis. Concrete over the flaws of the present with the flaws of the past.