As any public figure knows full well, entire legacies and reputations can often turn upon a single ill-timed phrase. “Strong and stable.” “Make them grovel.” Perhaps one day we may come to see the words of Trevor Bayliss at the conclusion of England’s recent humiliation in Auckland as his own modest contribution to the field.

“We’re not scoring enough runs or taking enough wickets,” he said, and as an analysis of an innings and 49-run defeat, it was certainly hard to fault on a factual basis. On the other hand, you wonder whether it rather reinforced the emerging impression of Bayliss as England’s ghost at the wake, its meat in the living room, its £500,000-a-year nonentity, the living embodiment of the axiom that you can’t do anything wrong if you don’t really do anything at all.

And the defeats begin to pile up, so do the questions. Is a coach with such a limited shelf life really the man to engineer a new dawn? As England face the imminent loss of three all-time greats, wouldn’t you want the person choosing their replacements to have watched even a little county cricket? When Joe Root looks this anxious, this haunted, this overstretched, shouldn’t a coach shoulder the burden instead of sulking in the shadows? And ultimately – this is the clincher – does Bayliss have any solutions beyond “scoring more runs” or “taking more wickets”?

The ECB, too, need to be planning a succession. The usual names will be thrown around – Paul Collingwood, Jason Gillespie, perhaps even a cheeky raid for Ottis Gibson – but almost as important as the identity of any new coach should be defining the role. Detached figurehead? Ego-masseur? Details man? Perhaps even two separate roles: given the increasing gulf between the red- and white-ball formats, and the relentlessness of the modern international schedule, there is certainly an argument to be made that the job of coaching the England cricket team has grown too big for one man.

One thing’s for certain, it’s grown too big for Bayliss.