England heads are down... and there’s no quick fix to the Test team's slump

England link up in Leeds on Tuesday for Friday’s defining Second Test against Pakistan.

They have lost six of their past eight Tests and seven of their last 10, with any suggestion of a bright new era snuffed out by the completion of their humbling at Lord’s inside four days.

READ MORE: Cricket: Warner and Bancroft sign up for limited overs

READ MORE: Cricket - Paine joins Root in dismissing spot-fixing allegations

Standard Sport picks through the bones of where they are going wrong.

Is Trevor Bayliss the right man for the job?

He is the right man for one of his jobs, certainly. The ODI side are going from strength to strength and Bayliss’s laid-back demeanour and emboldening of attacking players are central to that rise.

The Test side are regressing fast, though. Lose at Headingley and England will have lost half of the 41 Tests they have played in the three years since he took over. Just three of Bayliss’s 15 wins have come away from home, so he cannot afford to start losing series here, too.

After the Lord’s defeat he seemed genuinely unfazed by the prospect of losing that aspect of his job, joking that it would allow him more time gardening but he also vented frustration.

“I’m almost at a loss sometimes,” he said of the team’s performance.

One tricky issue here is who decides to replace him and how to manage that replacement. Bayliss reports to Andrew Strauss, who is currently taking time off with his wife as she undergoes treatment for cancer. Andy Flower is standing in temporarily but does he have the level of control and clout to make quite such an important decision?

What must Joe Root do better?

Joe Root Mk1, the cheeky chappy who impersonated Bob Willis after winning the 2015 Ashes and stood at slip laughing when Alastair Cook was hit amidships, seems a thing of the distant past. After just 15 Tests as captain (which have thrown up so many unexpected issues), Root looks tired and worn down so a return home to Headingley will be welcome.

This week is Root’s most important yet. At Lord’s, two poor days saw heads quickly drop as low as they did at even the worst stages of the winter and it is Root’s job to lift them.

Tactically, Root brims with ideas but is often too quick to embrace funk when the order of the day is orthodoxy — as Pakistan showed at Lord’s. He needs his fielders to settle into positions, particularly in the slips, and must find a way to get his bowlers aiming at off stump.

Nothing will help Root like a century. His second-innings 68 at Lord’s saw him battle back into form but he is desperate to lead from the front and break his run of 10 straight unconverted fifties across nine Tests.

What is county cricket doing wrong?

Counties have two purposes. One is to provide a talent pathway to the England team. The other is to win trophies at county level. Those two aims are often conflicting, particularly in a two-division structure which some feel can encourage short termism. A working party is currently looking at the game’s structure with a conference system seeming the likeliest outcome.

Fundamentally, Championship cricket currently struggles to produce Test cricketers — batsmen of steel, genuinely quick bowlers and proper spinners — because of the time of year it is played and its relentless grind.

April and September are months where batsmen know a medium-pacer’s ball could always have their name on it and spinners are overlooked for dibbly-dobblies. An encouraging crop of spinners, like Dom Bess, Mason Crane and Amar Virdi are coming through despite the system, not because of it, while Worcestershire paceman Josh Tongue has also impressed. Actual quicks — like Jamie Overton and Olly Stone — have struggled to keep their bodies healthy due to the schedule. This needs fixing, and perhaps centrally contracting certain players earlier — as Australia did with Pat Cummins — might help.

Where are the Lions?

The second string’s winter under Flower and Keaton Jennings was as bad as the Test side as they were humbled by West Indies A.

The Lions programme is well intentioned and thorough but hard evidence of promising players’ sustained improvement — by staying in the Test side — is thin on the ground. One issue is that players have generally been promoted to take on key jobs, like opener or No3, rather than being allowed to bed in down the order like Root and others were able to. The next cabs off the rank are Nick Gubbins at the top of the order and Joe Clarke in the middle. We may see them as soon as the India series.

Whose Test futures are on the line at Headingley?

England’s selection policy has generally been consistent, preferring to give players one Test too many rather than one too few. The flipside of that is that by the time they are finally dropped, the road back can look insurmountable and the players require some repair work at their counties. Still, Dawid Malan’s place is under real threat because, despite a century in Perth, he averages just 29 in Tests and, crucially, looks a little hapless in home conditions, which is a strange problem to have. Mark Wood bowled fine at Lord’s and can look the goods but still averages 41 in Tests.

Chris Woakes may get a go ahead of him anyway, while Bess accepted that scoring fifties is fine but he is in the team to take wickets. He needs some, because Jack Leach and Mason Crane will be fit to face India.