The Bright Side

So it all turned out to be true then - with both captain and coach gone on the same day leaving English cricket looking about as organised as a surrealist's free form art installation .

You can choose your own label from the following catalogue of disaster: debacle, farce, cock-up, or perhaps all three simultaneously, but no-one's emerged looking good from the process*: Pietersen for his wilfull petulance, Moores for his inability to handle the game at the highest level and the ECB for putting the ferrets down English cricket's trousers and then acting surprised when they end up fighting tooth and nail near some vitally important regions.

Still our naturally sunny and not at all in any way misanthropic life-hating outlook forces us to consider the bright side.

What do you mean, what bright side? Read on grasshopper to discover,

One: If it were done, 'tis well it were done quickly. Better that this happens now, than a month before the ashes . At least it will give Strauss two short series to stamp his authority on the team. It'll also mean we might get decent coach, rather than someone who's simply got the relevant ECB badges.

Two: It proves that cricket matters. It was the lead item on pretty much every form of media yesterday and shows just how integral cricket remains to the English psyche. On a day when myriad other stories from the sorry world vied for our attention, Cricket grabbed all the headlines, set the national news agenda and remains as important as ever.

For that small comfort at least, we should be truly thankful.

* Apart from Andrew Strauss who should have been made England skipper after the domestic Pakistan series.

England Woeful England

Widely previewed over the past 24 hours, the axe has finally fallen and if reports across the mainstream sites are to be believed, both England captain Kevin ‘KP’ Pietersen and coach Peter Moores have fallen on their collective swords this lunchtime.

It’s still unclear whether Pietersen has gone or has threatened to go if Moores stays – the only quote comes from Sky news who managed to ambush KP on his mobile but all he’d say was: "I am not in a fit state to talk."

Uneasy is the head that wears the crown and all that... Moores we were expecting, but KP as well? From the reports, it looks like he gambled on a ‘back me, sack him’ power play with the board that has spectacularly failed, but it would be pretty damn shocking to see a self-inflicted ousting only five months after he’d assumed the captaincy.

If it’s all true and that’s yet to be determined, with various sites currently getting splinters in their arse through all their fence sitting, the whole sorry spectacle has been thoroughly unedifying as watching Mike Gatting going on a rampage in your local cake shop. To misquote dear old Oscar, to lose either captain or coach may be regarded as misfortunate but to lose both at the same time? That looks like sheer carelessness.

Whatever way things pan out, KP has come out of it smelling of ordure. This is not so much washing your dirty laundry in public, as soiling it, flaunting it and then offering to rub the remains into the noses of random passers-by.

Even the news that Australia has had its worst ever sporting year is scant consolation on this darkest of days.