Dear Andy

Dear Andy,

Trust you'll forgive the cosy familiarity, but you lot at Lord's did say you wanted to reconnect with us, and few things are quite so alienating as an Andrew who thinks he's too posh to be called Andy.

What can we say? Has any new broom ever swept so much trash under a single carpet? Has an England cricket team ever played with so much sustained joie de vivre as that witnessed these past few weeks? No and no. Only someone with a PhD in "applied killjoyness" could even contemplate denying you the right to take a goodly chunk of the credit (even if we're by no means certain what you said or did to whom, when or how).

Quite a few of us will be congregating in Hyde Park on Friday for the final ever London gig by the city's greatest ever rock band, so forgive us for quoting Pete Townshend's second-best-ever slice of homespun philosophical gold. "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss" lags behind "Hope I die before I get old" for instant unforgettability, but it thrashed it for timeless aptness. Then you succeeded Paul Downton.

Frankly, we're still pinching ourselves. Is the most successful conservative captain in this country's cricketing history really the new Godfather, Don Cor-Blimey? Right now, let's just say we're open to persuasion.

That said, the narrowness of the line you're treading cannot be understated. Consider the following comment heard on Radio 4 last week: "I love cricket. It goes on for five days and it's absolutely boring." The utterer, though, was not a 75-year-old gin-soaked playwright who still regards Kerry Packer as the Antichrist, but Alex Paterson, the sprightly 55-year-old behind The Orb, purveyors of a musical genre called "ambient dance".

The Orb's biggest hit was the near-40-minute-long "Blue Room", released in 1992 and said to be the longest piece of music ever to invade the UK charts, and thus the most radical. When Paterson and his pal Kris Weston appeared on Top of the Pops, the track played in the background as they hunkered down in space suits for a presumably thrilling game of chess. Archetypal cricket fans, eh?

The Orb's languid, minimalist approach, reckons Paterson, has much in common with cricket - which makes you wonder how many Tests he has watched lately. And that's the problem. It's not the archetypal cricket fans who matter; it's the untraditional ones. The ones seduced by T20 but who need to be convinced that there is entertainment to be had from something that lasts four and a half days longer and doesn't lend itself quite so readily to dancers, prancers and chancers.

Brendon McCullum and David Warner, of course, have famously done their bit for inclusivity and genre-hopping, but so has that nifty stumper Sarfraz Ahmed, whose response to a crisis against Sri Lanka in Galle last weekend was to launch a counter-attack against the planet's best spinner, inspiring an improbable Pakistan triumph. So has Ben Stokes, whose century in last month's Lord's Test generated a sense of temporary iron-clad superiority we Poms haven't experienced in the 29 seemingly interminable years since Iron Bottom spanked Merv Hughes for 22 in an over to shut his and all those other yobbish gobs at the Gabba.

Given your somewhat ill-defined job (which appears to comprise being the captain's captain, the coach's coach and the selectors' selector, as well as hirer-and-firer-in-chief) the immediate priorities are twofold: 1) Give Paul Farbrace a job for life as Dr Feelgood; 2) Make it clear to one and all that conservative is the new c-word. Given how much money you've raised for the Tories, we'll understand if the second proves trickier.

For all the heartening omens, you see, what worries us - what with the A**** being a mere fortnight away - is the glaring absence from the training squad of Adil Rashid, the only Englishman we have ever seen claim an international wicket with an intentional googly on colour TV.

Think about it. Here you are, justly basking in the glow of this nation's most invigorating performance in a 50-over bilateral series since the Hollioake boys mugged Mark Taylor's mob in 1997, looking for the next move. Any true student of sporting strategy would propose doing the very last thing the opposition expect. And gambits don't come much more daringly unexpected than picking a legspinner for England in a home A**** Test.

The last even semi-specialist we can recall was Bob Barber, at Old Trafford in 1968, where he denied Bill Lawry and Doug Walters centuries but was summarily dropped - even though, just two Anglo-Bosstralian encounters earlier, he had cracked England's most assertive hundred against the old enemy since the boy Jessop in 1902. Ah, them were the days. The last Bossie to succumb to a legbreak in a series on these shores - at Lord's in 1968 - was that classy left-hander Bob Cowper, which is only marginally less astonishing than the identity of his executioner: Ken Barrington.

Which brings us rather neatly to the t-word, the word you flexed with such impunity and muscular efficiency when explaining why Kevin "c-word" Pietersen would not be considered for the coming frolics. Not "tw*t", "twerp", "twit" or "twazzock" but "trust". And Adil Rashid plainly doesn't inspire enough of it.

Trust takes many forms on a cricket field. A bowler trusts his batsmen to play wisely and his fielders to try their utmost. A batsman trusts his partner not to call him for a suicidal single, nor flail over a long hop when nine wickets are down and said batsman is on 99; nor, in the same situation, retire hurt with something piffling like a broken leg. A fielder trusts the bowler not to serve up the sort of tosh that obliges him to spend the day impersonating a golden retriever on Viagra. As you well know, though, nobody is quite so reliant on trust as the captain.

A captain trusts his capacity to justify himself - as enabler and exemplar, leader and player, tactician and tosser; trusts the selectors to give him the best available team; trusts the coach to address the weaknesses of that team; trusts his own ability to ensure that the team put "we" before "me", by however meagre a margin.

He also trusts the groundsman to give him the pitch best suited to his team, and trusts the weather to behave itself - although, depending on the circumstances, that could just as easily mean behaving badly as behaving impeccably. And a captain (let's call him Kim) also trusts that his best players (let's call them Dennis and Rodney) are not bent on making him look utterly and criminally incompetent.

So, Andy, the question is this: what can't Rashid - and, by extension, Pietersen - be trusted not to do? Play like a selfish idiot? Reinforce that national distrust of the maverick, not to say outsiders / interlopers / gatecrashers in general? Send sneaky, sarky texts to the opposition? Arouse envy? Can you honestly blame us for suspecting that Pietersen's most grievous crime was the last?

Team chemistry, we're confident someone with your impressively logical mind will concur, depends on achieving that elusive, oh-so-fragile balance between ego and collective. Call it positive friction. No two players are ever completely equal in the eyes of statisticians or rankings, much less the public. Internal competition supplies the sparks that light the flame. Igniting that inner competitiveness, furthermore, requires envy, even jealousy (however subtle the difference). If Wasim Akram struck in his first over, Waqar Younis would be all the more intent on striking twice in his.

The ultimate beneficiary, of course, is the team. But what happens when success breeds fear of decline, encouraging self-protective internal hierarchies? Hasn't that poor lad Craig Kieswetter confirmed that Pietersen's comments about cliques were not, after all, the rantings of a prima donna?

On the other hand, of course, this might all be a magnificent bluff. We have not entirely ruled out the possibility that you're trying to lull the Bossies into an even more advanced state of insufferable cockiness. And yes, maybe you deserve our trust. However abysmally the Bossies misread the pitch, transforming Headingley humiliation into Oval overjoyment in 2009 still stands as probably the most improbable turnaround of the century to date.

Perhaps it really has crossed your mind to "do a Cartwright", i.e. avert a national disgrace by replacing a bowling allrounder (Tom Cartwright) with a batting allrounder (Basil D'Oliveira), as the MCC shamelessly did before the abortive 1968-69 tour of South Africa. We can easily see how that might work with Moeen Ali. After all, he is a batting allrounder turned bowling allrounder, and Rashid is a bowling allrounder turned batting allrounder.

And maybe, just maybe, you've Skyped Pietersen in the Caribbean and read him that juicy titbit from one of your old tormentors in Saturday's Daily Telegraph magazine. "Are England stronger with Kevin Pietersen in the team, or aren't they?" wondered Shane Warne, strictly rhetorically. "As [a Bosstralian] cricketer looking at it, you'd be a lot happier not having Kevin Pietersen in the team."

And maybe, just maybe, you've told Pietersen you're absolutely convinced that Warne, no longer being a Bossie cricketer but a Bossie poker player, is double-bluffing on behalf of his buddy Michael Clarke. And maybe, just maybe, you've told Pietersen that this chimes precisely with your view that, right now, if Clarke wants him in the XI, the really clever ruse is to pick Rashid instead.

Yours nervily,

TGBP