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Spectator sport

The crazy rush to run down Alastair Cook

England's captain isn't a great tactician – but he is a great man. His critics would do well to remember that

12 July 2014

9:00 AM

12 July 2014

9:00 AM

A jaw-dropping moment on the front page of Her Majesty’s Daily Telegraph the other day: ‘How to fix England’, read the  blurb, ‘by Kevin Pietersen’. Rather like ‘How To Stamp Out Diving, by Arjen Robben’; or ‘Take Vanity out of Football, by Cristiano Ronaldo’.   Pietersen joins a dressing room full of former international  captains — Shane Warne, Geoffrey Boycott, and Michael Vaughan — who these days devote their column inches to slagging off Alastair Cook in particular and most of the English Test team in general.

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Roger Alton is an executive editor at the Times.

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