Hussain attempts to reverse one-day decline

Eleven one-day defeats on the trot is bad enough. Five more in Zimbabwe next month and England would equal the unwanted record of test neophytes Bangladesh.

Burdened by such depressing thoughts, Nasser Hussain's England side flew from Gatwick airport on Wednesday night for a brief tour England cricket authorities fondly hope will lay the foundations for a successful 2003 World Cup in South Africa.

England will play five one-day internationals in the troubled African nation with a mostly untried side after an awful year in the limited overs game.

During that period they have lost 11 matches in a row to Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Australia, failing to total 200 in eight of those. After being well off the pace in the last two World Cups their cricket looked positively stone age this year in comparison to the vibrance of the Australians.

Laying foundations is a laudable objective. The problem lies with the current quality of material.

The England squad was strengthened on Monday with the recall of Graham Thorpe after a season disrupted by injury. The gritty Surrey left-hander remains England's only world class batsman in both tests and one-day internationals.

Opener Marcus Trescothick also has the ability to succeed in both forms of the game, although the merciless Glenn McGrath exposed his sometimes leaden footwork in the triangular series with Pakistan this year and the subsequent Ashes series.

And then?

Hussain is a fine, agile fielder but still to find a niche as a one-day batsman. Mark Ramprakash delighted his many admirers with a polished century in the final Test against Australia. But he has been trusted with only 13 one-day internationals over 10 years, a reflection of his inability to adjust to the different format.

BARELY REGISTER

At least Hussian and, to a lesser extent, Rampraskash have performed at Test level. Some of their present colleagues barely register on the national let alone the international stage.

Paul Collingwood looked out of his depth with both bat and ball in the triangular series and the faith shown in the Yorkshire left-arm pace bowler Ryan Sidebottom is mysterious.

Paul Grayson is the latest in the undistinguished line of English slow left-arm bowlers who toil but rarely spin. Jeremy Snape is not even the first choice off-spinner for Gloucestershire.

Then there are the perennially under-performing all-rounders Andrew Flintoff and Ben Hollioake.

Flintoff finally shed his excess weight. But a county championship batting average of 31 and a haul of 19 wickets demonstrate a thin Flintoff is not necessarily more successful than a fat one.

Hollioake has not matured since his deceptively promising debut against Australia four years ago. His batting is overly dependent on the front foot drive, his fast-medium bowling, delivered from wide of the crease at the leg-stump, is one-dimensional.

Hussain, an uncompromising realist who took the 4-1 Ashes defeat this year particularly badly, knows the magnitude of his task.

"We have lost 11 on the bounce and we have got to put that right," he told a news conference on Wednesday. "Winning is a habit and although we have gone a long way to putting things right in test cricket we haven't done that yet in one-day international cricket.

"We have got to get some sort of formula and start winning.

"The one area that obviously sticks out is finishing off games. In one-day internationals we have played well for large parts of games. We don't finish it off, whether it be with bat or ball.

"It's something we have to put right. We are in a big World Cup quarter-final or semifinal and we need 100 off 15 overs with seven wickets left, we have got to win those sort of games and we haven't done that recently."

Mail Cricket Editor