All-time England World Cup XI

England's greatest World Cup XI, you say? Easy peasy. I've got for you a seamless, glorious blend of talented youth and gnarled experience. A mixture of all-time greats, stars of the future, and one-off tournament-specific tyros, perfectly packaged in their iconic sky-blue outfits, and offering a range of talents and expertise so varied that you could hardly have computer-programmed them better.

It is captained by arguably England's greatest one-day batsman. It harnesses the last drops of brilliance from the country's greatest allrounder. It features an agenda-setting wicketkeeper-batsman at No. 3, a Great White Hope at No. 4, a master of strike rotation at five, and a pocket battleship at six. A quartet of allrounders from seven to ten, and an understated spinner at No. 11, who had four first-class centuries to his name.

They could have won the World Cup. They should have won the World Cup. Derek Pringle will tell you they would have won the World Cup if "Allah hadn't been smiling" on Javed Miandad's front pad (Javed's words, not Pringle's). Instead, their near miss became the high-water mark of England's World Cup history. It was their third final in five tournaments, and the most devastating defeat of the lot. And since that fateful night in Melbourne, each of England's six subsequent World Cup campaigns has been abysmal. You can keep your Flintoffs, your KPs, your Goughies and your Swanns. The team of '92 are the lost legends of English cricket.