England are bad and boring, too

England, over the course of their many calamities, used to have the "grand, curdled talents" to at least make them watchable, says Barney Ronay in the Guardian. Even that has been lost:

And so here we are now with an England team it is almost impossible to get a genuine look at, an amorphous blob without edges, or areas of interest, so boring that even the debrief, with the same old talk of mindsets and sacking the coach, seems interminably dull.

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The fact is in the end England were beaten by teams who simply had more ragged edges, more extreme qualities, more sense of waspish energy. With this in mind perhaps the best place to start is with something else that seems to have disappeared from English cricket. In the end maybe it all comes back to fast bowlers.