Joe Root should resign but finding his England replacement is not easy

This is the sort of crisis we like, one we can revel in, a sporting calamity but no more than that. Lives have not been ruined. No one has died. The options ahead, though hard to unravel, are not terrifying.

Three months ago, England’s cricket team was thrashed by a good Australian side and as a consequence the managing director and coach was sacked by the England and Wales Cricket Board’s Red Adair, Andrew Strauss, who belied his reputation for rock-solid pragmatism by sending the side off to the Caribbean without some of their best players – just to see what happened.

Now England have lost humiliatingly to West Indies, a moderate, spirited side nowhere near as good as Australia. Something must be done to hasten “the red-ball reset”. Fresh cliches may be required.

So we can all leap on our bandwagons. This means I can rail against the myopic structure of English domestic cricket, which has the prime cricketing months of the summer being devoted to two types of short-form cricket. Why should the next generation of cricketers be bothered with this archaic red-ball game? The money is elsewhere. The advent of the Hundred is symbolic of a sleepwalk to decline; it may be a godsend for women’s cricket but the death knell for the men’s game.

Others may use England’s demise this winter as confirmation of a county structure that’s not fit for purpose. Why not be radical and abolish them all? Use the Hundred model to create some red-ball franchises in the urban centres and bugger Bognor, or Hove, or Taunton or Chelmsford or Worcester.

And what about our battters? They can only score runs on featherbeds and how can they possibly prosper when they never encounter genuine pacemen in county cricket? Except that they have been