Dan Jones: England not far off being a good side? That’s like saying my dog is seconds off being Olympic 100m champion

The ball did nothing. The pitch did nothing. And England’s batsmen did nothing. They turned up to Auckland today and rolled over - supine as a dead hedgehog, and twice as flat. In an endless Test winter not short on ghastly sights, this was the watch-between-your fingers train wreck of them all.

Put aside one-day cricket, which is a different game on a different trajectory. Some of us still care about the long form. England’s whistle-stop Test ‘series’ of two matches against New Zealand was supposed to be a chance to put the 4-0 drilling in the Ashes into context. England aren’t that bad, surely?

Well, no. They are worse.

To be bowled out for 58 in 20.4 overs on a pitch that was nothing special — to a pink ball, yes, but one bowled in full daylight - is so freakishly hapless that we might be tempted to write it off as an act of God. A black swan. The sort of thing that just comes along sometimes. Like the boiler blowing up in your mansion, the stock market collapsing, or an asteroid hitting a city.

It is true that many of England’s Test players arrived in Auckland having played no serious warm-up games. Alastair Cook, it has been reported, was lambing on his farm a fortnight ago.

But to grant England the benefit of the doubt in this Silence Of The Lambs grade horror show would be to let off the hook a side whose recent record away from home reads P11 W0 D2 L9. By the time this present debacle has run its course they may have gone 13 away games winless. Unlucky 13? No. No more than 58 was merely a bad day at the office.

England faced two good seam bowlers in the two hours their innings lasted. Nothing more and no one else. Richard Hadlee did not show up. History will remember Tim Southee and Trent Boult as artful practitioners but they are not bogeymen with which to frighten little batsmen who won’t go to bed on time.

Yet they ripped through the English line-up like a sheet of damp newspaper, or second-tier international part timers. Actually, I hesitate to liken England to Afghanistan or Nepal, who at least tend to bat like they know which end of the wooden thing is for holding, and which for sticking in front of your stumps.

Their dismissals were not the result of an unplayable ball hooping round corners in the dark. Yes, Kane Williamson caught a snorter to dismiss Stuart Broad, but mostly England got themselves out with brain-farts and brain-fades: lapses in concentration and failures in technique that looked as awful at the time as they do played in the lowlights reel of England’s wince-and-you’ll-miss-it innings. Moeen Ali getting clean-bowled to a full toss from Southee was like a bad joke: a Moeen tribute act to his own Test self.

While England were being flogged around Australia over Christmas, captain Joe Root repeated ad nauseam the excuse they had not been outplayed, except in key moments of each Test. (i.e. when it actually mattered.) We are not that far off being a good side, he said.

Well. On the evidence of what we saw this morning, England are not far off being a good side in much the same way that my dog is only a few seconds off being the Olympic 100m champion. Fine margins matter in sport. Indeed, they are everything.

The honourable exceptions to all this are England’s pace bowlers: Broad and James Anderson, the all-time great opening-bowling unit that Trevor Bayliss and Root, in their wisdom, think should be broken up for scrap. Given 58 to bowl at (I am literally lifting a couple of inches from my seat in fury each time I type that number), they and Chris Woakes hit the slot under the floodlights. Broad was rewarded with his 400th Test wicket when he snared Tom Latham for 26.

But that 26 only illustrated how poorly England’s bowlers have been served by their rotating but reliably dysfunctional batsmen. Broad’s 400th-wicket match will now be famous for something else entirely: the day when only a quick slog from his colleague Craig Overton got the team’s first innings total above 30.

Still, here they are. The end product of all England’s slow-drip failings has finally been delivered. The failure in the short and medium term to identify Test batsmen and nurture them. The failure in the long term to protect long-form cricket from the creeping vines of the one-day stuff. The failure to ensure that touring England sides are given adequate preparation matches - an agreement that should be reciprocal between all major Test nations out of pride and decency if nothing else. The failure to foresee that a tour of the antipodes lasting from November until the end of March went out with the age of the paddle steamer. The failure to manage the coaching duties of Bayliss, who is spread impossibly thin.

How do England get out of this one? They ended today 117 runs behind at Eden Park. It remains theoretically possible if practically unlikely that they will save this match and salvage the series. But they cannot pretend any more that all is going to be okay in the Test game. It is not okay. Not by a long stretch.