For 10 minutes, I just sit there, unable to move. A couple of team-mates walk past, but I can’t even muster the energy to look up. I am caught in a web of conflicting emotions. I feel incredibly tired, as though I have simply run out of energy. I have nothing more to give.

Andrew Strauss, Driving Ambition (2013)

Cried all morning.

First to Nichola.

Then to Richard Bevan. Then to Craig.

Then to my dad.

Michael Vaughan, Time to Declare (2010)

It is often said that all political careers end in failure, and perhaps the same might be said of the England captaincy. Since the retirement of Mike Brearley in 1981, 13 men have done the job on a permanent basis. Seven were sacked or replaced. Six resigned. Only Keith Fletcher won his final series in charge. You do not end an England captaincy. One way or another, it ends you.

Perhaps, as Joe Root prepares to lead England out at Lord’s for the first time, this strikes you as a faintly macabre line of enquiry. But the cycle of optimism and misery has seen too many iterations over the years to be coincidental. Is the England captaincy really an inevitable march to a mournful ending? Or can the cycle finally be broken?