Forewarned is not necessarily forearmed. Alastair Cook counselled that he was “a conservative bloke” upon borrowing the captaincy from Andrew Strauss, yet it was still a shock to see the extent of that conservatism during the first Test in Bangladesh. It seems peculiar to criticise somebody who scored 212 runs in their first Test as captain, yet Cook’s performance in the field reinforced the perception that he is mainly in charge because of a process of elimination.

If his first-innings 174 was a splendid example of Cook finally turning a century into what his mentor Graham Gooch calls a “Daddy”, then in the field he was too often a little boy lost: his field placings were reactive and negative, and his bowling changes mechanical. Brilliant with the bat, mediocre in the field: it might have been an homage to Andrew Strauss’s first series as captain, against Pakistan in 2006.

Cook is a deceptively tough, resourceful fellow and, as Lawrence Booth noted on these pages, has one of the most important qualities of a great captain: the courage of his convictions. There is every chance that, like his batting, the positivity of his captaincy will imperceptibly increase; just as it is no longer a JFK moment when he hits a six, one day the sight of four slips might not lead us to wonder whether the heat has gone to his head.

Strauss has shown that, even with a conservative nature and a limited tactical imagination, you can turn yourself into a good captain. But there is little if any precedent for very good or great captains as cautious as Cook was in Chittagong. In football management, negativity and greatness are far from mutually exclusive; in cricket captaincy, it is a different story.

The decision not to enforce the follow-on was surely the correct one – but only because England had made an earlier mistake by picking four bowlers, again demonstrating their 20th-century approach to selection, which presumes that one size fits all regardless of pitch and weather conditions.

A similar lack of imagination was evident in Cook’s missionary-position field placings, particularly on the final day as England flirted with the humiliation of a draw. It is a gross oversimplification to suggest that the extent to which a field is attacking can be judged purely from the number of close fielders, as Michael Vaughan showed with his successful passive-aggressive fields during the 2005 Ashes, but it was still hard to fathom Cook’s reluctance to press Junaid Siddique and Mushfiqur Rahim during their mammoth partnership.

A maximum of two slips were in place for almost all of their 70-over stand. When Cook did put in a third slip, it was at the expense of short leg. And while such a desperately turgid pitch meant that the slips were relatively redundant, a third slip undeniably increased England’s chances of victory a lot more than a third man. There was also marked reluctance to try to tempt the batsmen into attacking strokes against the seamers by taking out mid-off or extra-cover. And when Naeem Islam spanked Swann over the top near the end, Cook put mid-on back even though Bangladesh needed over 200 runs for victory with only three wickets remaining.

He was also frustratingly reactive, shutting stable doors all over the place as horses bolted giddily into the middle distance and most of us prayed for a new cliche. The worst example when Siddique snicked Graeme Swann through gully, only for Cook to put a gully in next ball. Slow cooking is all the rage just now, but you suspect this slow Cook will start to grate should he persist with such an approach.

In some areas, he was scarcely even reactive. It soon became apparent that, in this particular match, Tim Bresnan was England’s least effective seamer with the new ball, which did not swing, and their most effective with the old ball, which did. But Cook stuck to the plan of giving him the new ball, even though there was a compelling argument that it should have been handed to Steven Finn, so that he and Stuart Broad could extract whatever bounce there was in the first few overs with the harder ball. With the exception of a couple of overs for Jonathan Trott, there were few signs that Cook was willing to think outside the box.

On the field he managed to stay inside the box as one of the lads, rather than a senior figure apart, and that created an environment in which England were as relaxed and mischievous – Graeme Swann’s frustrated send-off to Siddique notwithstanding – as they have been for a long time. The players still called him by his regular nickame, Chef. It is hard to imagine them calling Andrew Strauss ‘Brockett’.

It is difficult for a stand-in captain to really impose himself, as Strauss found in 2006, and in that regard Cook’s plan to “still sit on the back of the bus” was probably very sensible. But faint heart never won fair urn and, on this evidence, England might want to keep Strauss in a padded cell in the lead-up to the Ashes.

Rob Smyth is a freelance writer. His book, The Spirit of Cricket, is published by Elliott & Thompson in May