ENGLAND'S GREATEST XI?

Sometime soon after they beat India by an innings and 242 runs at Edgbaston last summer, England's players gathered together to discuss what would happen next. That victory meant that they had just become the world's No1 ranked Test team, a title they'd last held 31 years previously. The first item on Andrew Strauss's agenda was obvious – they had to win the next Test at the Oval and secure a 4-0 whitewash of the opposition. Beyond that though, lay wide horizons leading only to the limits of their own potential as a team. Exactly where that limit lay, no one was quite sure.

James Anderson remembers that the team talked about what they wanted their legacy to be. Their ambitions, it seems, were a little more modest than those of some of their supporters among the public and the press, who were already anointing them as one of the finest teams ever to play Test cricket. Their hubris was exposed during the winter. No, Anderson says the team's own expectations of themselves were a little more conservative. "We want to be one of the greatest England teams there has ever been," Anderson said this week. "We honestly feel we have the potential in the dressing room to achieve that. The next couple of years will define us."

Andy Flower recently offered a succinct diagnosis of exactly where his team went wrong in an interview with Steve James in the Daily Telegraph. "We weren't skilful enough against the spin. Our individual methods were not clear enough in the individuals' minds … I think it boils down to the picking of the length of the ball and then the moving of your feet according to that length. I don't think we did that part well." If the batsmen can rectify that, Flower seems to suggest, and the England team will be capable of winning series on the sub-continent.

It is typical of Flower to have determined the source of the wound with such precision. Others will wonder whether the team's flaws are so easily defined. England sides across all sports seem to suffer from a chronic inability to sit comfortably on the summit. They tend to topple off to one side and tumble back down the mountain so they can start their long slog upwards all over again.

The 2005 Ashes team did exactly that. Chronologically, they are the nearest rivals the current England team have for the title of being the finest the country has ever produced. Of course there is some overlap between the two. Andrew Strauss and, arguably, Kevin Pietersen, both seemed to be better batsmen in 2005. For Ian Bell, the reverse is true. Michael Vaughan was a shrewder, smarter captain than Strauss. Heretical as it may be to say for a Somerset fan, Alastair Cook has probably surpassed Marcus Trescothick as the greatest opening bat England have had in the modern age. There's considerably less room for debate when it comes to the wicketkeeper, Matt Prior being indisputably better than Geraint Jones. Similarly, the comparison between England's spinners then and now isn't going to delay anyone long.

The relative merits of the fast bowling is a more interesting question. Undoubtedly England now have a greater pool of players to pick from, but whether or not their first choice attack matches up to the quartet of Andrew Flintoff, Steve Harmison, Simon Jones, and Matthew Hoggard is a tougher question. Flintoff, in his 2003-05 form, is the 2005 side's single biggest advantage over the current lot, giving balance to the side and blessing them with the luxury of a five-man attack. Flower's team compensate for that by having a shorter tail.

Still, having ambled through that rather ad-hoc analysis, The Spin is more convinced than ever that the current team have the edge on their 2005 predecessors. If they are really to be judged the best team England have ever had we have to leaf back beyond 2005, past Mike Brearley's sides from 1981 and 1979, back even beyond Ray Illingworth's team from the early 1970s, until we reach the mid 1950s.

Between the Ashes defeats in 1950-51 and 1958-59, England won 10 series, drew four, and lost none. The players' names from that era are redolent of greatness: Peter May, Len Hutton, Denis Compton, Colin Cowdrey, David Shepphard, Tom Graveney, Bill Edrich. Godfrey Evans as 'keeper, Trevor Bailey as all-rounder. Tony Lock, Johnny Wardle, and Jim Laker were the spinners, Fred Trueman, Brian Statham, Frank Tyson, and Alec Bedser the quicks.

That selection spans the best part of a decade though, so you're almost drawing a composite XI together. Tyson, Statham and Trueman, for instance, only played one Test together, and England lost that by 10 wickets. To make a fair comparison with that lot you would have to draw together the best of the England teams from '05 and the present day. So if you had to single out a specific team from that earlier era, it would probably be the XI who won the Ashes in 1953: Hutton, Edrich, May, Compton, Graveney, Bailey, Evans, Laker, Lock, Trueman and Bedser.

Whether or not this England team can ever match that one, as Anderson says they can is something that only future generations will be able to judge. Nostalgia gives the 1953 team a natural advantage.

Over those next two years England play series at home to the West Indies and South Africa, away to India and New Zealand, and home and away to Australia. If they stay unbeaten through that run, then they will have earned that legacy Anderson says they hunger for, as one of the greatest XIs England has ever had.

• This is an extract from the Spin, the Guardian's free weekly cricket email. To sign up, click here.