England generate yet more bull

Anyone who claims that cricket journalism is an easy lark has obviously never had to sit and watch England make perpetual fools of themselves in the one-day arena. It really is the most soul-destroying of occupations. Day after day after day, the same old rubbish is served up for our delectation, with lashings and lashings of the same old failings and a side-order of the same old excuses, and we poor mugs try to turn this into the purplest of prose, trying to kid ourselves that we, they, you ... anyone ... actually gives a stuff.

As Andrew Flintoff might put it: "We're trying, we really are." So, deep breath, here we go for the umpteenth time this month.

Since, well, whenever. Whatever. Who cares? Not the England team, that's for sure, and therein lies the problem. Perhaps it's just the latest Machiavellian trick to emerge from those conniving spin-merchants at the ECB, but suddenly the team's 5-0 Ashes drubbing - their first whitewash against Australia for 86 years - seems like the high point of a miserable winter's campaign. It really has been that desperate.

Somehow, there is always a stigma attached to English defeats against New Zealand. England's farcical Ashes campaign in 1990-91, for instance, became even more embarrassing when they failed to overcome the Kiwis in both the Benson & Hedges World Series, and the subsequent three-match one-day tour.

And if that's the case, then today, the team took a significant stride towards completing their most ignominious tour of all time. But England better get used to the feeling. On March 16, in less than two months' time, their World Cup campaign gets underway against the same opponents in St Lucia, and on this evidence, they'll be lucky to put even Kenya, the former semi-finalists, and the John-Davison-powered Canada in their place.

In the meantime, the CB Series is providing quite enough spleen-venting among the press corps. One-day cricket brings everyone all out in a rash of adjectives. A quick scour of the wires reveals that, on other pages, England's latest performance has been described as "woeful", "desperate", "shambolic", "pathetic" and "flaky", as they were "hammered", "blitzed", "trounced" and "destroyed" by the "rampant", "buoyant" and "determined" Kiwis.

And to that, England might be expected to respond: "Bovvered?" Their attitude to one-day cricket is as fickle as the entourage of WAGs and infants that has been trailing around in the team's wake all winter, although - tellingly - there has been no-one in the set-up willing to have a good old-fashioned tantrum. A combination of Duncan Fletcher's impassivity and Andrew Flintoff's banality has seen to that. "The lads are trying their damnedest to win games," was Freddie's latest variation on the same soundbite, another infuriatingly deadpan response to a flatlining tour.

And when the cameras panned in on the dressing-room, Fletcher's hangdoggy-in-the-window expression was, to the average long-suffering England fan, every bit as slappable as Ricky Ponting had found it to be at Trent Bridge in 2005. Quite how the shunned Chris Read, sitting in fulminating silence beside him, resisted the temptation, no-one will ever know.

Last year, Fletcher infamously claimed that he knew "ten of the eleven players" whom he would like to have playing at St Lucia on March 16 for the opening match of the World Cup. For all we know, he still moans "Jonesy" and "Tresco" in his sleep to this day. But it's time to wake up and smell the coffee, Duncan. Those boys are gone, and they ain't coming back.

It's quite an irony, given the disparaging comments that Fletcher has long been making about county cricket, that three of the key figures as England claw their way to the start of another World Cup campaign, are Jon Lewis, Paul Nixon and Mal Loye - thirtysomethings one and all, and men who owe their very livelihoods to that maligned county treadmill. It's certainly not how England would have planned their winter. But seeing as they didn't actually bother to plan it in the first place, it seems about fair.

But enough pontificating about the same old spiel. It really is too depressing. Perhaps, in the spirit of this bloated, corporatised era of the game, it's time to automate our reports on these abominable contests. In fact, why wait for the technology to catch up? There is already in existence a handy 'bullshit generator' that, with a couple of quick tweaks, could easily churn out 700 words for next Friday's 252-run defeat against the Aussies.

I've been playing with it for the last five minutes and the machine has already identified three of Team England's key requirements, which is three more than any of Flintoff and Fletcher's press conferences have so far managed. Three quick clicks reveal that they need to "engineer robust partnerships", "target seamless channels" and "unleash next-generation models". Over to you Mr Ken Schofield and the ECB Review Committee. Let's see if you can better that bull, on and off the pitch.

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