Who says English cricket lacks inventiveness?

Paul Collingwood recently described England's World Cup tactics as "prehistoric", which was a bit of a slur on prehistory. In fact, early humans took a dim view of batsmen who refused to hit over the top in the first 15 overs - the cave paintings at Lascaux include a daub of a blue stick figure playing a forward defensive, then being chased by a sabre tooth tiger and a spear-wielding mob.

English cricket is often accused of being complacent, stuck in the past, boring to watch and pathologically incapable of coming up with interesting nicknames that are not derived by adding a "y" to a player's surname.

But this is unfair. English cricket is ripe with invention. Take one county at random: Worcestershire. The Squashy Pears have been pioneers in several areas. For many years the director of cricket, Steven "Rhodesy" Rhodes has been experimenting extensively with defeat, in search of the perfect loss, like a chef trying to concoct the ultimate gooseberry fool.

His side has also been at the forefront of the underwater cricket craze, and in a recent T20 game decided that they might as well not bother having a wicketkeeper, asking Ben "Coxy" Cox to pack it in and go field at leg slip instead.

This same spirit of what-the-hell experimentation was on display at the Edgbaston Shopping Centre* on Tuesday when England threw caution to the wind and introduced the following three innovations:

1: Scoring lots of runs in the first 15 overs.

2: Continuing to score lots of runs for the remaining 35 overs

3. Picking Adil Rashid

Previous England teams had preferred a policy of amassing a polite but not vulgar number of runs in the first 15 overs, gathering an even more modest sum during the rest of their innings, and using Rashid as a semi-professional water-bottle courier - like Adam Sandler, only nowhere near as irritating.

So well done to Eoin Morgan, for dumping England's old game plan, but not so well done to Brendon McCullum for rummaging through the Edgbaston dustbins, finding England's old game plan, dusting it off, and deciding that it was worth a try.

But the off-the-boil Black Caps were not the worst offenders against innovation. While the England players were pushing the frontiers of English cricket by scoring lots of runs very quickly and not losing, certain sections of the Eric Hollies enclosure were sticking to their old game plan: getting drunk as quickly as possible and entertaining themselves by stacking one beer cup on top of another.

This spectacle is not without its zoological charm, like watching chimpanzees learn a new skill, but you suspect that even chimpanzees would grow bored after the sixth or the seventh empty plastic beer cup. In fact, had Charles Darwin had been present in this corner of Birmingham on Tuesday afternoon, he would probably have dashed off an urgent telegram to his publisher requesting some late amendments to The Origin of Species.

So now that the England team has started breaking records and playing 21st-century cricket, a few choruses of "Barmy Army" and a bit of primary-school cup-stacking isn't going to cut it, England supporters. Time to up your game, or you may find yourself getting the KP treatment. That's how the ECB roll these days: one day you're indispensable, the next, you're prehistory.