The real problem, in the end, was how little it seemed to be a problem. As England’s cricketers prodded their way to a strangely immobile 58 all out in Auckland, the Test team’s lowest ever first innings score on a covered pitch, the TV cameras kept flitting around in search of some defining note of crisis, settling with a sense of declining interest on the mild, untroubled face of Trevor Bayliss.

There it was again, the Bayliss face, looming beneath that leathery white hat. And still conveying through this historically dark moment for the national summer sport all the savage, rage-filled intensity of a papier-mache-covered balloon plonked propped up inside an England tracksuit and decorated with an expression of polite, arm’s-length concern.

This is, of course, a misleading first impression. Bayliss is a hugely successful and committed coach. He’s a nice bloke. He works hard and travels all year. He is clearly not the main, or even one of the main problems with England’s Test team. But is he actually a part of the solution?

Again, that lack of pain. England were bowled out for 58 and instead of horror and blood, the old familiar bruising, it was possible just to enjoy the soft, satellite-fed greens of the outfield, the bleached-out powder blue sky, the beauty of Trent Boult’s in-nipper that spun Ben Stokes around like a man stuck in a revolving door, bails pinging off behind him in a matching arc.

On BBC radio Graeme Swann said it was just a bad day, that we shouldn’t think for a moment of taking the Test job from Bayliss. Swann was a great England cricketer. He knows this team really well. But he is surely too clever, and too exacting himself, to really believe there should be no accountability, no referred pain up the line.

Dwindling interest. Administrative fudge. The indifference of the modern world. Bayliss didn’t cause these. But he is still the head coach of a team that has lost 10 of its past 13 Tests away from home. And as he spoke with an interested smile about “a lack of intensity” in his own Test team it was clear, once again, that it is shamefully negligent of the ECB to have entrusted the rasping, gurney-bound body of English Test cricket to someone who clearly doesn’t feel the necessary desperation, that absolute vocation to preserve this beautiful, irreplaceable oddity.

Contrast this with the madness of the tail-end of the Andy Flower regime, arguably the last time all of this seemed to really, really matter. Four years ago the 5-0 Ashes whitewash unspooled into a kind of fury in Sydney, with Flower in the Bayliss chair, all furious, mangled intensity, a desiccated walnut in a baseball cap.

Asked if Alastair Cook was a good captain Flower replied, “There are different levels of good”, and there was a swirl of incredulous rage in the room, a realisation once again that the best coaches and managers are essentially mad. That this is why they infuriate you, why they seem so desperate. Because the opposite is to be rational, to cease on some basic level to believe. At which point sport itself, an essentially emotional business, starts to die.

And yes, it’s that old story again. It is hard to say anything about Test cricket these days without at some point starting to talk about death, sounding the klaxon for the end of the world. When it comes to the longest form we all become dying Romantic poets, one hand on the laudanum.

But the fact is Test cricket has always been about to die, has spent its entire vibrant 141-year existence menaced by the future. Death and decay are a natural part of the poetry of a sport so intimately tied to the seasons, spring greens through to autumn browns.

Test cricket probably shouldn’t have survived, should have died either side of the war, might have died many other times. Blink a little and it isn’t a terminal patient: it’s a miraculous survivor.

What keeps it going is constant life support: love, faith, obsession. It is essential for all concerned, above all the England head coach, to care blindly and madly, to communicate this passion into the veins.

And so we get Bayliss, who shouldn’t really be sacked because he doesn’t really do much anyway, doesn’t pick the team, doesn’t determine which players are available. But who will by 2019 have been paid £2m by English cricket fans to not really care about, or be that good at the form so many people love above all others.

Right now the ECB could do much worse than rotating Bayliss out of Test cricket and appointing not only a coach but a Test tsar with extended powers, someone like Nasser Hussain or Alec Stewart, there solely to promote, select and lobby for the red-ball game.

Death is not inevitable. This doesn’t have to happen. Test cricket is still gripping, is still a Great Product. But there is a carelessness here, and Test cricket can’t survive carelessness.

It is instead a case of maintaining that care and intensity, surrounding the most fragile form only with people and things that are part of the solution. Not to mention ridding us all of a coach whose polite sense of bafflement, whose failure to bring through talent, is a part of the death, not the continued precarious life of Test cricket.