First published in 2013

A study by Harvard University and Google in 2010 suggested that there were 1,022,000 words in the English language. Sometimes all 1,022,000 are redundant, as a look can convey something more powerfully than even the most eloquent tongue. I am in love with you; I am in hate with you; I am truly sorry; and have you seen the bloody England score?

 You could make a great silent movie out of reactions to an England batting collapse. All it would require is a series of variations on one basic look. It’s a look English cricket fans know intimately, pitched somewhere between exasperation and hilarity – or, in this acronymous age, between FFS and LOL. Watching England lose five wickets for eight runs to some wobbly dobber is such a perfect introduction to life’s vicissitudes that they should stick it on the curriculum.

While many of England’s collapses have been to mediocre spinners or workaday seamers, a few have been the consequence of greatness in the opposition – a greatness that cricket’s two-eyed nature allows us to appreciate, even if it’s only with hindsight. Warne; Ambrose; Ambrose again when England were obliterated for 46; Glenn Effing McGrath, to give him his full name. And of course Pakistan, who script more English collapses per head than any other country. The summer of 1992 will forever be the summer of the English collapse, when Waqar, Wasim Akram and Mushtaq Ahmed regularly ensured the tail started at number four or five.

When England exhibited a remorseless excellence in 2010–11 – with a couple of collapses for the road at Perth and Trent Bridge, of course – it was genuinely unsettling. If we hadn’t seen such poverty we could live with being rich. Then, on the first morning of the first Test against Pakistan in 2012, England’s first as No.1 in the world, they collapsed to 43 for 5. The world was back on its axis and three of those 1,022,000 words in the English language – England, batting and collapse – were back where they belonged. Together.