Matt Maher: Plenty of hype but a few too many defeats for England

For head coach Brendon McCullum and captain Ben Stokes, the 4-1 loss should at the very least provide something of a reality check.

Amid all the talk about the positive brand of cricket brought in since McCullum’s arrival two years ago, for the past 12 months it has not delivered much in the way of results.

England have not won any of their last three Test series and have lost seven of their last 11 matches. It feels fair to question, amid the hype, just how much they have advanced as a team over that period?

In India, it felt they simply ran into a stronger unit who gradually ground them down in one of the toughest environments to play the sport.

There were undoubted flashes of promise, the superb first Test win being the most obvious. Yet on the whole, there were too many echoes of last summer’s 2-2 Ashes draw with Australia, when it felt England were too happy to claim a moral victory rather than a real one.

In all the third, fourth and final Tests in India they established good positions, only to squander them, Joe Root’s disastrous attempted scoop to Jasprit Bumrah being among the series most defining moments.

It is likely the hosts would have won anyway, yet England did not help themselves.

No-one can dispute England are much improved from the team McCullum and Stokes inherited but they remain a long way from finished article.

This series also highlighted the difficulties of maintaining development due to the domestic game’s problematic structure. Spinners Tom Hartley and Shoaib Bashir both showed promise but how likely are they to play when the County Championship begins just three weeks from now?

That, of course, is the kind of problem for which McCullum and Stokes need help from the administrators. In the meantime, they must consider whether their own methods aren’t in need of some refinement.