Alastair Cook must go! Alastair Cook might go. Alastair Cook could conceivably go. Providing, you know, he’s OK with it. In the buildup to the final Test against India in Chennai Cook announced that no decision would be made “in the heat of the moment” on his future as England’s Test captain. No shit, Sherlock. This has been the mission statement throughout, an England era forged in the ice of the late Flower years, where all decisions were made in the cool of the moment, bowling dry, captaining dry, press conferencing dry.

And now finally we have the spectacle of Cook ceasing to captain England in stages, exiting with all the unhurried deliberation of a genuinely great cricketer whose craft, grit and basic stillness have been an understated marvel of the sporting age.

It is all a little mannered, don’t you think? Like one of those mature, bloodless divorces where everyone stays friends and holds hands at the Christmas carol concert and weirdly still goes on holiday together. But then England Test captains don’t get hounded out these days. Look back and you could say there hasn’t been a really good, gimlet-eyed hounding since the sacking of David Gower, who always had a very hound-able style, so louche and airy at times you expected to look down and notice he’d spent the post-lunch session batting with an ivory shooting stick in a pair of silk moccasins.

Mike Gatting was hounded out over a nonsense, when he really should have been hounded out on his record. Even Kevin Pietersen, who tied himself in knots hounding his own head coach, simply slipped away in the end. Cook was hounded from the one-day team, although only when it became unavoidable what an unsustainable role this was for him all along; and only after a period where he genuinely did try to adapt his game, albeit always a little awkwardly, like the village curate gamely learning to breakdance.

And yet Cook has not been hounded as Test captain. There have been persuasive, reasoned assessments, the odd sharp remark. But no actual Cook-must-go-stuff, no calls for a sacking not a resignation. This despite the fact there’s a case Cook is one of the worst Test captains England have ever had. Yeah, you heard me. This hasn’t really come up much has it? So let’s do it here.

As has been widely noted if England lose the current Test Cook will creep past Mike Atherton’s all-time Test loss record. Fair enough. Cook has captained in more Tests than everyone else. Still, though. Look back further and of 16 England captains to have racked up 20 matches or more only Atherton (marginally) and Gower (runaway leader on 56%) have lost a higher percentage than Cook.

Plus of course there is the issue of resources. Atherton, Gower, Gatting, even Graham Gooch all straddled the basket-case days of cartwheeling instability, loopy selectors, terrible prep and at least one, if not two steamrollering Test opponents on regular rotation. By contrast the Age of Cook has been blessed with unprecedented stability, centrally contracted players, endless wonks, fluffers, gophers and every last crowning glacé cherry of sports science. Cook has had England’s most successful fast bowling partnership of all time in his quiver. All this at a time when much of the rest of the world has stopped treating Test cricket as the grail. Let’s face it, England should have been cleaning up out there.

And yet the past four years have been fretted with defeat, with 20 losses in Cook’s last 42 matches alone, including the invertebrate collapse in Australia, a one-off thrashing in Bangladesh and home defeat to a semi-interested Sri Lanka. On the stats it is a run of failure to trump anything that has gone before. And all at a time of unprecedented good health at the top. You could even say over the past three years, Cook has been the worst captain England have ever had. And yet he remains unhounded. How can this be?

The answer, of course, is that none of the above is really true. Or at least it’s not the whole truth. It’s a line. Cook hasn’t been a very inspiring captain, true. His best qualities are probably not really captaincy qualities. The worst of his leadership has been evident in the current series. It has been a weary endgame.

And yet Cook’s England team have still won two Ashes series, won in India and won brilliantly in South Africa at the start of the year. The loss statistics are skewed by the fact there just aren’t really many draws these days. Look closer and Cook has also won as many Tests as Andrew Strauss. He’s been OK, decent, not bad, and more menaced by instability than it might look at first glance given the weirdness of the unlovely Paul Downton era.

The real reason for attempting, belatedly, a little hounding here is simply the lack of it, a feeling the office of England Test captain at least deserves a little froth, the odd thunderingly partial rant, and that Cook might have got some in times past when cricket filled the skies, a genuine national summer sport.

It isn’t hard to see why Cook has escaped such treatment. He remains an admirable and likable elite sportsman, not to mention an all-time English batting A-lister. His batting has always been a marvel of pared-back craft, proof in its own way that there is also brilliance in the slow, the considered, the attritional. On his best days he settles in the middle like some relentless Soviet-era combine harvester steadily toiling its way from horizon to horizon. But blessed also with that wonderful pull shot, a moment where he seems to lose himself, becoming suddenly natural and loose, all graceful swivelling violence. And not forgetting the Cook cut shot, springing back and scything down on the ball like a man startled up out of his wicker conservatory chair thrashing furiously at a mouse with a stick of firewood.

Cook doesn’t deserve a hounding, just as houndings are in isolation fairly unhelpful in any case. Cricket journalists are reasonable people, aware of the difficulties of the sport, the complexities of leadership and succession, the fact the captain himself is often a little powerless. And yet it is still hard not to conclude there should have been a hounding all the same, that perhaps the slightly graceless stat-picking above will have to do in its place. I don’t want England captains to come and go in this measured, grown-up fashion. I want the news pages to bay for blood. I want agenda-heavy ranting, news hacks with a grudge.

I want the wonderfully overblown Michael Henderson calling Cook’s England “buttock-clenchingly awful” as he did the class of 1999, causing swoons in the press box. I want Henry Blofeld accosted by Ian Botham, or the excellent Stephen Brenkley being throttled across a dinner table by the chairman of the ECB. This has to matter, and to a stupid degree. Cook will depart unhounded, as is, in all likelihood, only right. As Test cricket continues to shrink back into its heartlands, the task for his successor is not only to lose a little less, but also to remain in sight, to seem to matter, to exist beyond an increasingly internecine register of worth and value. With any luck, even to be hounded a little in time.