The joke's no more on England

Despite the strenuous efforts of those who have to find something to say or write every day to convince me that the ODIs between England and Australia had some relevance to the Ashes this winter, I remain firmly of the belief that the series was largely superfluous and meant very little beyond avenging the 6-1 result last summer.

Half of the England side will have very little to do with the Test series in a few months time, after all. Neither Luke Wright nor Mike Yardy have any business near a Test squad and Craig Kieswetter's wicketkeeping is not good enough to recommend him as the backup to Matt Prior. Eoin Morgan will almost certainly be in the squad but will only get to play if there are injuries to the specialist batsmen, and Tim Bresnan has no obvious qualifications to be in the first-choice XI. If there was one thing we learned from the series against Bangladesh, it was that Bresnan is not a Test-class new-ball bowler, and that Ajmal Shazad is a better old-ball bowler to boot. Bresnan may be a marginally better bowler than Jacques Kallis, but Kallis doesn't get into the South African side on the strength of his bowling, and Bresnan offers rather less than Kallis with the bat.

Admittedly, most of the Australian ODI XI would be in serious contention for places in the Test team but the one who would be of most significance is Shaun Tait, who doesn't play first-class cricket.

Tait's opening spell at Lord's was a fearsome piece of fast bowling in any type of cricket, and one can easily see why people will be trying to persuade him to change his mind and make himself available. I'd like to join those efforts, although perhaps not with the best of motives. I'd strongly urge Australia to build him up as their talismanic match-winner and get him fit and firing for the first Test, so that he can break down mid-Test and Australia can spend the rest of the series dithering about their selections and eagerly scrutinising fitness reports, just as England spent a good couple of years hoping that Fred Flintoff would turn up fit for a match or two, thus destabilising the team and making life difficult for themselves.

What the series was more relevant to was my colleague Michael Jeh's piece about prospects for the World Cup. Fully embroiled in the English season myself, the World Cup is a long way down my list of things to think about but Fox has made me sit up and realise that something extremely weird has happened.

At this stage in a World Cup cycle, it is traditional for England to be wringing their hands and wondering where they are going to get eleven convincing 50-over practitioners, let alone a complete squad. The summer's ODIs and the series following the Ashes see a parade of unlikely candidates with strangely impressive domestic records getting runs in the side which they use to prove their mediocrity, and we end up going into the tournament without much clue as to what side we will pick or what they will do on the field.

Today, though, and barring a string of major injuries between now and then, England have no such uncertainty. It is quite conceivable that the England XI which just played against Australia could turn out in the World Cup final, and they would stand a reasonable chance of winning it. And on the evidence of the series we have just had, it is entirely possible that their opponents would not be Australia.

Those are not predictions, of course. It is merely an arresting way of saying that England have improved enough to be taken seriously as ODI competitors instead of being regarded as jokes, only there to make up the numbers and that Australia have declined sufficiently that they aren't the white-hot favourites they have been for the last two.

The world has been turned on its head. I think I need a lie-down.