This winter, England have failed at Twenty20, failed at 50-over cricket and last week they even failed at 49-over cricket.

Yesterday, however, they had an excellent chance to turn their luck around in a Twenty-two22 match. We don’t have the exact figures to hand, but England have rarely lost in this format.

Alas, it was not to be. When they needed 20 runs off two balls, we were still quietly confident. But when that became 20 off a single delivery, the game was as good as up. Sure enough, Stuart Broad failed to make the ball turn invisible and thus couldn’t push through for the all-run 20 that would have kept England in the series.

We have a three-point plan for how our national side should arrest the decline:

1. Stop doing Riverdance at the crease. If you’re going to repeatedly miss or mishit the ball, do it from a stationary position. Wait and see where the bowler’s bowling the ball before doing the ‘wander and a jig’ thing.

2. Play ludicrously straight. England hit almost all of their boundaries and lost no wickets when the batsmen aimed at the opposite set of stumps.

3. Unofficially rename power-plays. The word ‘power’ seems to bring about a testosterone-fuelled red mist whenever the fielding restrictions are in place. We’d call the shots played ‘agricultural’ if it weren’t that modern agriculture rarely depends on a man trying to turn himself into a spinning top by heaving a bit of wood around with all his might like a frightened caveman in a knobhead competition.

See King Cricket’s regular blog at www.kingcricket.co.uk. King Cricket is a cult figure in the world of cricket blogs and was TWC’s first Best-of-blogs winner in April 2008.