In early 2009, shortly after Andrew Strauss and Andy Flower had taken over as England captain and coach, they paid a visit to Alan Stevens, a corporate consultant who specialised in conflict resolution.

Stevens told them that what the England team had been lacking, particularly in the disastrous Peter Moores/Kevin Pietersen era, was a charter, a code, a set of shared values to which all players and staff could subscribe.

So Strauss and Flower went away and came up with an ethos that would express the values of the England team they wanted to build. They came up with this: “The team is not a hire car.”

The idea was that players would be given responsibility for developing their own games. No more forced training sessions on the eve of a game. No more long sermons from a schoolmasterly coach.

For the ethos of this England team under Strauss’s directorship is quite different to what it was under Strauss’s captaincy. Under Alastair Cook (reluctantly at first), and then Eoin Morgan, Trevor Bayliss, Joe Root and even Mark Robinson, England teams have privileged individual expression as the surest way of extracting the best from all 11 players. In essence: do what the hell you want. Play your shots. Go to the IPL. Have a night out. Whether it is an ill-advised swipe when you are trying to bat your way back into a Test match, or a fearless, devastating volley of hitting to pull an ODI out of the fire, action without consequence is essentially the catchphrase of this side.

Behind that, you have the big sell. Fearing irrelevance, and with the next television deal never far from its thoughts, English cricket – following the lead of cricket more generally – has assembled its future on the basis of marketable personalities rather than an excellent collective, and has incentivised accordingly. Tom Harrison’s claim that he would rather England play entertainingly and lose, than play conservatively and draw, was just one of a thousand such subliminal messages emanating from the ECB over the last couple of years. Be aggressive. Never take a backward step. Back yourself. Go hard or go home. And with most players, it works a treat: imagine, by way of example, how much less interesting Moeen Ali’s England career would have been under the Strauss/Flower regime.

It is possible to see in all this, too, a portent of something larger. In an age of franchise cricket and split loyalties, perhaps this was always the logical endgame for a philosophy that sees a team sport as a vessel for individual indulgence.

Or, to put it another way: perhaps the England team really is a hire car.