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In the last two years, England have lost a whole bunch of one-day series. Their record is not quite as horrific as people make out, but it's the wrong side of mediocre and India and Australia have both hammered them.

"If we get on a roll and play well then you never know. It's a really exciting place to be at the moment," is Alastair Cook's take on this. The warped reasoning is that things can't really get much worse, so what's to come must be exciting. For his part, Ian Bell offers: "We haven't played particularly well in our last one-day series, but this is a great place to start improving", which seems cut from the same cloth.

These statements are straight off the ECB media cheat sheet, a laminated single-page propaganda document that is handed out to all the players and staff to help them present bad events in a good light when interviewed by the press. Here are some other highlights.

The World Cup is bearing down on us like a cricketing hurricane. We can already feel the bluster of its irresistible force blowing hard against our houses: There's the plethora of venue guides and exhortations to visit the host nations and cities, a touristic PR tour de force that makes Tony Greig's fantastically enthusiastic on-air recommendations of Sri Lankan mangos and Colombo seafood restaurants seem half-hearted. The nostalgia for anything and everything thrown up by tournaments past, from glorious kits - ah, 1992, where would cricketing chic be without you? - to mesmeric knocks and iconic shots. Then there's the arguments over which one of South Africa's impressive body of self-destructions was the most comic, plus the endless repeats of Bermuda's Dwayne Leverock, a salmon trapped in a hippo's body, swooping through the air to take that catch.

One essential part of any frothing World Cup build-up is missing, however, and cricket fans are increasingly restlessly asking two all-important questions: Why hasn't the official mascot yet been announced, and what on earth is it going to be?

A worrying ECB report shows that interest levels among England cricketers have dipped alarmingly.

Peter Moores, coach of the England Cricket Club, is trying to keep the flame alive but he faces an uphill struggle.

"It's tough," says Moores, as he slowly stacks a pile of isotonic performance cones after fitness practice.

Sri Lanka Cricket asks Sangakkara to put off retirement
Sri Lanka Cricket has asked Kumar Sangakkara to consider putting off retirement, at least until hell freezes over. It is thought that doing so will give the young Test team, still struggling to cope with the retirement of Mahela Jayawardene, the time needed to settle down and regroup during a period of flux and relative instability.

The board went on to explain that unprecedented weather patterns in the Netherworld over the past few years had actually seen an overall cooling in the region's temperature, and that they anticipated hell to fully freeze over in a couple of hundred years or so. "It is our hope that our middle order should be looking more settled by then," a board source said.

Cricket, ever the technological mover and shaker, has recently allowed us to be privy to umpires' conversations during the Decision Review process. This has offered an unprecedented insight into how officials come to their conclusions, and stunned viewers with the confirmation that Billy Bowden likes the sound of his own voice quite a lot.

Not content with merely hearing Nigel Llong say, "Can you give me another angle?" supporters have demanded further information about how these fascinating creatures go about their daily lives.

Here one such official, who has asked to remain nameless, exclusively reveals the shocking nature of what our sport's elite umpires get up to on a typical day away from the ground.

There seems to be some disagreement within the West Indies camp as to which direction to look. Kemar Roach's position is as follows.

A new sporting body is being set up to oversee corruption in world sport: the Board of Criminal Corruption Investigation For Improved Future Administration. Working out of a modest palace in Dubai, the supra-administrative body will look closely at all accusations of sleaze, bribery and malpractice in football and cricket, and have the power to clear senior figures in both sports of any wrongdoing.

"We were massively impressed by the work our football counterparts have been doing on the World Cup bids investigation," said a high-ranking Indian cricket official. "And it struck us that if we in cricket could pool our resources, we could really take whitewashing to a new level."

The newly formed body will have wide-ranging powers including looking the other way, one hand washing the other, and accepting that in some situations a certain amount of wheel-greasing is needed to get things done.

Success begets success, they say. What they don't tell you is that this rule doesn't necessarily apply when the success in question was achieved playing cricket against a post-2000 era Zimbabwe team. It is all the more important, therefore, that you enjoy it while you can if you're a Bangladeshi fan currently basking in its unfamiliar glow.

Sure, there's no denying that the team has won some noteworthy battles in the limited-overs arena, but then again, nothing quite compares to the giddy self-regard and sense of accomplishment that back-to-back Test wins bring. That said, any new experience can be confusing at first if you don't know what to do with it. With that in mind, we hope you find the following guide useful in helping you make sense of these unprecedented times and proceed confidently into the apparent new dawn.

Be obnoxious
The first thing you'll want to do as a cricket fan who has supped from the cup of success is be obnoxious about it. Traditionally fans from India, Pakistan, England and Australia have ruled the roost in this regard, in some cases elevating online trolling to an art. Well, it's your time to shine now, Bangladesh. Except for one little thing: because the opposition was Zimbabwe, the likelihood of actually finding Zimbabwean cricket fans online to skewer is about as likely as finding Zimbabwean cricket fans offline, at large in the world. They are like the chupacabra, or Cameron White's ability to smile: little more than a rumour or a myth.

It's been said that one of the potential benefits of the low expectations surrounding England's World Cup bid is that they might be able to fly under the radar. This raises an important question: what kind of radar can't detect England?

There are only ten Test-playing nations. Of those, surely only eight have even an outside chance of winning the World Cup. England might well be towards the bottom of that eight, but radar that can only detect seven different threats is none too impressive.

England really shouldn't be too hard to detect either. It was after all the British who brought the sport to the world. If you can't pick up England, who can you pick up? Will India also saunter in unspotted? Will even the host nations sidestep attention? Actually, New Zealand conceivably could. A number of people don't seem to have noticed that a number of matches will be taking place outside Australia.