Of all the characters in cricket’s diorama of eccentrics, the national selector is perhaps the quirkiest of all. It is – if you think about it – an exceptionally strange position, one that exists in virtually no other sport. This sense of peculiarity is only enhanced by the identity of its current occupant, Ed Smith, who in his designer sunglasses and expensive navy blazer looks less a linchpin of high-performance sport and more an off-duty 1970s British Airways pilot kicking back at the Coconut Lounge, an Atlantic Breeze perched rakishly between his fingers, a comely girl called Vanessa sitting on his knee.

Even selection itself is a deeply curious pursuit: neither art nor science, trade nor vocation. You can’t train in it. You can’t do an NVQ in it. It sits, instead, in the voodoo netherworld of alternative belief, on the sliding scale between tarot and proverb. Selectors are not born or made; like pygmies, water diviners and toilet-cubicle graffiti, they just are. And for all its claims to empirical merit, it’s impossible to rationalise why one player gets selected and another doesn’t.

Then again, maybe there’s no explanation at all. “You don’t know what the selectors are thinking,” said Hildreth earlier this year, and for England’s forsaken copper generation, it might 
as well be a mantra. You could spend a lifetime unravelling the mysteries of selection, scrutinising the enigmatic croupiers who practise it. Ultimately, though, you may as well be staring into the bottom of a coffee cup, telling everyone you’re sure it’s going to rain in a bit.