‘Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.’

Jonny Bairstow knows what the problem is. Two days after the invertebrate batting collapse against Australia, six days after the invertebrate batting collapse against Sri Lanka, Bairstow spoke out this week. Some English people – journalists presumably; self-motivating strawmen definitely – don’t want England to win the ICC World Cup. This apparently is the problem.

It is a misguided suggestion on the most basic level. For the last four years this England team has been a source of pure visceral pleasure. Even the most jaded of observers wants to watch Jos Buttler somersaulting his way to 77 off 33 balls, as opposed to Jos Buttler on a green pitch batting with all the assurance of a three-legged dog trying to cross a busy dual carriageway.

More to the point, this is to misunderstand the business. There is a huge slice of media self-interest in England winning the World Cup. Out there beyond the bubble they’re not exactly gasping for England-lose-again-at-obscure-summer-sport stories. Cricket is increasingly pushed to the margins, a vanishing square of green. Defeat is frankly no good to anyone.

Plus, of course, England are still well-placed to do the opposite. They can win four games from here. The dry weather will help. Other teams also have flaws. Never mind the angst, or those weird press conferences where Eoin Morgan pronounces his words with clipped and regal disdain, looking like the president of the space federation taken hostage and forced at gunpoint to sit in front of a board covered with adverts and talk about field settings and bowling changes in the powerplay.

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And yet this isn’t quite the whole story, is it? Because Jonny is also right. There is something else here, another question, something rather glossed and unexamined on the way here. England can still win the World Cup. People want them to win the World Cup. But do England actually deserve to win the World Cup? And what would it mean if they did?

This is clearly not a point about the team itself. Win matches, lose matches – it’s always deserved. The rest is just noise. And the players themselves are popular, even rather cherished in the case of Jonny B: so spiky, so relentlessly affronted, standing there with his bat raised like a scimitar and hitting the ball with such purity of purpose.

This is instead a matter of trajectory. Does English cricket deserve to win the World Cup? It is a question that goes to the heart of what the whole spectacle is actually for. In its pure form international sport is not about salesmanship or revenue streams. It is instead a test of systems and the wider culture.

Success is a reward for good choices and care taken across every level. International sport tells us about the physical health of a nation, just as the best teams tend to speak to some wider sense of collectivism and shared resources well used.

We remember that gold-standard Spanish football generation; the gushing tide of brilliant Australian cricketers in the 1990s; the schools and clubs that fed the Caribbean islands. All of these reflected mass participation, not to mention a pitch of obsession, happiness, love – all of this expressed in the details of elite level success.

Meanwhile, here come England. Enter the blue Lycra machine, the scowling men in shades, emissaries of a sport that happens behind the high Palladian walls or on the edge of town where the green spaces appear.

What system is being exemplified here? What message would it send out if England were to become world champions? Neglect the grassroots. Retreat from state schools and inner cities. Give up on the poor. Hurl the carved wooden chairs into the fire, gurgle down the last of the claret from the cellar. Enrich yourself, while making the one thing you have to give invisible. And yes, you still get to win the World Cup.

That resource-heavy team at the top is in its own way a kind of con job, there to blind us with its stand-alone brilliance. In reality it reflects little of the wider national life, or of 50-over cricket (which has been all-but abandoned now) as some kind of happily embraced obsession.

Instead we have dramatically falling participation, a minority sport headed the way not just of golf, but of polo. We have an England team built on sloganeering and marketing phrases. We have a set-up that talks about playing “a brand of cricket” as though brands are actually real things or even good things.

In the last few weeks this brittleness has revealed itself. The stitches have shown a little in the light, the feeling emerged of something slightly ersatz. It’s there in the prim, pointless moralising over Alex Hales, who deserved a ban but should be in the squad now.

It comes in the weirdly inflexible way England have assumed a style that suits everywhere except their regular home conditions. It comes in the way nobody knows who the next best 50-over batsmen are because we don’t actually play this format very much. It’s there in the spectacle of a laissez faire coach whose effects could be replicated more cheaply by propping a slightly gloomy looking turnip on a raised balcony seat, covering it with a floppy hat and sunglasses, writing the words “that’s the way they play” on its forehead and paying it a quarter of a million pounds a year.

And still “deserve” really has got nothing to do with it. This is sport, where victory montages are compiled by the winners, and where the whole narrative can turn on a few details of skill and luck. England are good enough to win this from here. But from a certain angle they do look a curious bunch of pretenders.