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We read this week that Brendon McCullum has been disaster planning for next winter’s World Cup. This does not mean planning the exact way in which it will be a disaster – something England coaches often seem to have done to deliver previous campaigns – but planning how to handle worst case scenarios, should they arise. The absolute worst case scenario, we imagine, would be Adil Rashid getting injured. 

Over at Cricinfo, Vish seems to think England’s recent results might call for some of these newly dreamed-up emergency remedies to be employed – but as far as we can make out that process is already underway. It looks to us like these horrors were in fact the product of some early field testing.

To recap: in the last week, England failed to defend 430 against Sri Lanka before losing to Pakistan when they’d had them 154-9 in pursuit of 242.

In both cases, Adil Rashid was not in the team. Obviously, we cannot know this for certain, but equally obviously we actually do: England would have won both games had he been playing.

It’s true.

Sure, Rashid can go for boundaries, but he has always been hard to cart continuously. His USP – his raison d’etre, even – is that set batters eventually mishit one. If they don’t, it is because they have consciously held back from doing so, in which case they’ll have shifted an even greater weight of necessary run-scoring to the overs delivered by the other bowlers.

Sri Lanka reached their target with one ball and two wickets to spare. Pakistan had a few balls left unused, but they were already down to their final wicket by the 34th over. England should have won both. With Rashid, they would have won both.

It has always been like this. Since the 2015 World Cup, England have won more one-day matches than they’ve lost. Before that, it was the reverse. Adil Rashid became a regular only after that tournament. This is not a coincidence.

Jos Buttler remains an asset, but his days of outright irreplaceability are in the past. For England, there is only one disaster that cannot be mitigated.

So that’s that. England have made their contingency plans for Rashid being unavailable and the outcome of those plans is that they will lose matches they’d otherwise have won. 

It’s not what you’d call a flawless plan, but you work with what you have. This is the disaster plan.