Pakistan v England: Our domestic schedule is the elephant in the room - Chris Waters

Not that of the broadcasters, who have so much vested interest in the white-ball game which has led to the marginalisation - one could say ruination - of the County Championship.

Not that of the England and Wales Cricket Board, which has eyes only for The Hundred, it seems, and the making of money.

“How do we learn from this? How do we improve?” the pundits pondered in the aftermath of the 2-1 series defeat, sealed before lunch on day three in Rawalpindi.

Certainly not by having no County Championship cricket in August, for example, that is for sure.

That is not going to help our batsmen and bowlers learn the skills necessary for spinning pitches and the challenges of the sub-continent.

Blame the Championship when everything goes wrong; praise it when everything goes right.

It’s the oldest of cliches.

But we all know what is to blame for defeats like this.

How are we going to find and encourage world-class spinners by playing most of our red-ball season in April and September, when the pitches are green and the weather indifferent?

How are we going to find batsmen with the requisite tools to negate the challenges presented by such as Noman Ali and Sajid Khan, who took 6-42 and 4-69 respectively as England subsided to 112 all out, Pakistan romping to a 36-run target with nine wickets left?

One can blame the players and coaches ad nauseam and say that they need to learn X, Y, Z, that they need to watch how the likes of Noman and Sajid went about their business and, earlier in the contest, Saud Shakeel, who made a fine hundred.

But only up to a point is that fair.

We have some very fine players indeed but a very poor system that does not give them the best opportunity in these sorts of conditions.

To blame it all on Bazball is the easy excuse.

It is not Bazball that has failed, it is the game’s administrators.

Put bluntly, they are simply not interested when push comes to shove.

After a few days of hand-wringing, of pointless debriefs that skirt around the issue, the show will move on to New Zealand in a couple of weeks’ time and all of this will soon be a memory.

When England next return to the subcontinent to play Test cricket in early 2027, the problem is only likely to be worse, not better, the cycle continuing ad infinitum.

None of this is likely to be explored on your televisions or radios. How could it be?

Sky, for example, great job though it does, is in bed with The Hundred, which has taken out August when the pitches are most likely to favour the spinners, and so is the BBC.

It is the elephant in the room that they seem anxious to sidestep at every opportunity, not wishing to defecate on their own doorstep.

But how can a serious conversation about England’s repeated failures with, or against spin, be had without some admission that our county schedule is a massive contributor?

It is like someone with an alcohol problem refusing to accept that their consumption might just be impacting on their quality of life, and on those around them. It is, in other words, akin to denial.

Where are our Noman Alis and Sajid Khans - good bowlers, certainly, but hardly among the annals of the game’s greatest spinners?

What chance has Rehan Ahmed, say, got to develop his skills? Shoaib Bashir is another learning on the job.

People will blame the pitches and Pakistan’s tactics in raking and scraping and blowing them dry.

But amid all the guff spoken directly after the end in Rawalpindi, about taking the positives and adapting better to challenges, pretty much the only sentence that stuck in this mind came from the lips of Shan Masood, who pointed out that Pakistan also had to adapt to the unusual conditions presented; in other words, it was the same for both sides.

A word on Masood, who sealed matters with a six off Bashir over long-off. He had lost his first six Tests as captain but fought back superbly to win the last two.

No Yorkshire fan, surely, would begrudge him his triumph - nor that of Jason Gillespie, the club’s former head coach, and now in charge - albeit nominally, it appears - of Pakistan.

If only Pakistan could carry such pitches around with them (along with their patio heaters, industrial fans and windbreaks), they would be on top of the world rankings faster than you could say “The Hundred is a bag of spanners”.

For England, the archetypal flat-track bullies, there is little or nothing that is likely to be done to change matters.

No major tweaks to the team are likely; no alterations to method are set to materialise.

We have a broken system that simply doesn’t work and ensures that we can never be a force in all conditions.

The elephant in the room is swinging her trunk - and no one gives a monkey’s.