It has come to something when an England team who arrived in Australia in November with high hopes of winning back the Ashes begin a home series against lowly Pakistan with ridicule breathing down their neck.

England have had a decent stab at portraying Wednesday’s first Test at Headingley as a fresh dawn – and haven’t we had a few of those. But the return as captain on his home ground of Joe Root and the presence of Marcus Trescothick as stand-in coach feels not so much a brave new world as a blast from the past. It is procrastination disguised as progress.

Until Stephen Fleming takes over in time for the winter series in South Africa, England will be treading water. Victory over a Pakistan team ranked seventh in the world will do little more than keep Root’s team afloat. Defeat, and they could very well go under.

It does not bear thinking about, especially since Australia’s humiliation by Bangladesh in Darwin has, briefly, given them some material for the never-ending battle of Ashes banter.

The absence of Fleming, though, has done little to dispel the sense that England have wasted the past few months. Instead of being sacked after the Ashes, as might easily have happened in another era, Brendon McCullum was allowed to carry on into the summer, at which point Ben Stokes’s unhappiness with the set-up exploded during his night out in The Rex Rooms – with the consequences we have now.

It isn’t so much that England haven’t won a series for 20 months, and have just lost their first home series of three Tests or more for the first time in 14 years, though those facts are bad enough.

Joe Root must lead England to victory over Pakistan in this series. Defeat does not bear thinking about

But with Root and Marcus Trescothick (above) in charge it all feels like a blast from the past 

It’s that the absence of any meaningful forward planning has left them with a captain whose lack of strategic acumen – obvious during his first 64 Tests in charge – was again evident during the 65th, against New Zealand at the Oval in June.

And with an interim coach who was part of McCullum’s uncritical inner coterie, and whose most notable contribution to the Ashes debacle was to suggest after the defeat in the second Test at Brisbane that England hadn’t discussed their loose dismissals during the first at Perth.

It’s a good job Pakistan find themselves at an even lower ebb, and possibly the lowest in their otherwise proud history, despite squaring their recent series in the Caribbean with a morale-boosting eight-wicket win over West Indies in Trinidad.

But that followed a 2–0 defeat in Bangladesh, and was one of only seven wins in their last 26 Tests stretching back to the middle of 2022, a sequence that also includes 17 defeats. They have not won a series in England since 1996.

The only team they have beaten in the last three years? That will be England in October 2024, when they employed giant fans and heaters to turn the pitches at Multan and Rawalpindi into dustbowls, a move that was mysteriously waved through by the ICC.

Their task this time has been made harder by the news that Babar Azam, their returning captain and star batsman, will miss the first Test after taking a blow on the right hand from Hampshire’s young fast bowler Manny Lumsden during last week’s warm-up game in Beckenham.

Babar is expected to be fit for the second Test at Lord’s, but his absence here – at a time when he was threatening to return to form after a barren run – has deprived the tourists of one of the world-class players in their ranks capable of making England’s life difficult. Salman Agha, who has led Pakistan in 50 T20s and a single one-day international, will take over, adding to the sense of two teams making it up as they go along.

In Babar’s absence, the player most likely to cause England problems is Mohammad Abbas, a probing seamer whose 897 first-class wickets have cost 20 each, and whose long CV includes stints at four counties. Armed with the familiar Dukes ball at a damp Headingley – and the forecast is mixed – he ought to be a handful.   

Up against him is an England top order that confirm the make-do-and-mend nature of their Test team. Emilio Gay tailed off during his debut series against New Zealand after a promising start, and warmed up for this game with a pair for the Professional County Club Select XI against the Pakistanis.

Pakistan will be without their skipper Babar Azam (left) for the first Test but will have the canny bowling of Mohammad Abbas to call upon

Jordan Cox will bat at No 3 only two games after making his debut at No 7 as England indulge in yet more whack-a-mole

Jordan Cox, meanwhile, will bat at No 3, only two games after making his debut at No 7. England’s relentless game of whack-a-mole, dealing with one crisis before another pops up, shows no sign of stopping any time soon.

Neither has it helped that Gus Atkinson and Josh Tongue, two members of their first-choice seam attack, were involved in the final of the Hundred on Sunday evening at Lord’s. There, they hurled themselves into the fray for Manchester Super Giants, a franchise 70 per cent owned by a Kolkata-based business conglomerate whose main interest is not the fortunes of England’s Test team but a sizeable return on their £81million investment.

If anything exposed the lunatic nature of the schedule, and the priorities of the ECB, it is the idea that these two crucial bowlers will automatically be able to switch codes.

It is not just the Test team who are flying by the seat of their pants: it is the whole of English cricket, squeezing in fixtures and formats, and hoping no one collapses in a heap. That may be good enough to see off Pakistan over the next few weeks, but England fans will need some convincing that it’s a recipe for regaining the Ashes.