Joe Root is struggling to win fans over after another series defeat

To listen to Joe Root’s interview with David Gower after England’s 10-wicket humiliation by West Indies in Grenada was to understand the scale of the denial and delusion that has come to define English cricket.

His team, said Root, had shown a brilliant attitude. There were good things to take away from their latest series defeat. The players had to keep learning, keep growing. They were doing a lot of good things — now they had to turn those things into results.

You don’t say, Joe. Because that is one victory in 17 Tests now, and five series without a win.

He may be ‘passionate about taking the team forward’ but he sounds completely out of touch.

English cricket fans are not fools. They will soon tire of PR guff that bears no relation to reality. In fact, some already are. One friend said a few days ago: ‘They’ve made me not care.’

Another messaged to say: ‘Just not interested any more.’ Social media is full of this stuff. People are fed up.

They will not calm down while Root is talking in cliches about another hapless performance that threatens to take England back to the bad old days of the 1980s and 1990s, when our Test team were regularly a laughing stock.

The ECB need to be careful. For years, they have worked on the basis that England will always fill up its Test venues. Gradually, that assumption has bred complacency: the administrators have taken their eye off the red ball, and emptied the coffers on behalf of the Hundred.

Fans will not continue to pay good money for a day at the Test if all they get to watch is another weirdly experimental England side failing to dismiss tailenders with the new ball or collapsing like a souffle at the first sign of pressure.

And if England, who venerate the game’s longest