English cricket is in crisis. We have never had anything like it. We're just too good. "It was embarrassing," said someone who had been at the Oval. We have taken the best team in the world and we are making them look like a pub side from Minehead. We have skittled them out and carted them over the park, and in true English fashion we are now wringing our hands and wondering whether – I say, old fellow, are you all right down there? – we have been too hard on the Indian tourists for the good of the game.

This honed English side is nothing like the portly bunch of sloggers I remember from the 1980s; and there is at least one crucial distinction between this amazing series and the Ashes triumph of 1981. That was a one-man show, a leonine stand of defiance by Ian Botham. This has been as well-oiled a piece of teamwork as the engine of some German car, every piece whirring and pumping with silky efficiency for the good of the whole.

It has been a triumph of self-discipline, concentration and graft. It is a lesson to young people everywhere, that if you are really prepared to work at something, you can turn your life around. The England team have gone from being a bit of an international joke to the greatest team on Earth. Andrew Strauss and his boys should be role models. There should be posters of them in every room, and adolescents across our cities should be finding bats and tennis balls and emulating their feats in every park.