Cook should go - but it's the head of the rotten fish that is England cricket that is really responsible for failure.

"I have never been a quitter. To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body" so said Richard Milhouse Nixon in his resignation speech. He had held on to the bitter end and it wasn't pretty to watch. Alastair Cook's attempt to hang on to offce as England's cricket captain is in the same vein. Not quite as portentous, perhaps, but equally distressing. Nixon was a shit. Cook self-evidently is not. And therein lies the rub. Most of us - the unpleasant Piers Morgan aside - like Cook and want him to succeed. But he isn't succeeding either as a batsman or as a captain. Only his stubbornness and the embarrassment of the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) could combine to keep him in office any longer.

The ECB nailed their pro Cook colours to the mast in no uncertain terms at the time of the sacking of Kevin Pietersen:

"... the England team needs to rebuild after the whitewash in Australia. To do that we must invest in our captain Alastair Cook and we must support him in creating a culture in which we can be confident he will have the full support of all players, with everyone pulling in the same direction and able to trust each other."

This was I think an unparalleled statement in the history of sport. It effectively said that the failure in Australia was not due to poor performances and leadership but to the absence of a supporting culture in the dressing room. Those of us watching from a distance saw only the lousy batting, the dreadful bowling, the shaky fielding and the scramble-minded leadership. We saw a senior player, Graeme Swann, walk away from the tour halfway through when he saw his poor form likely leading to his being dropped. He didn't stay on to encourage the squad, which he easily could have, but did a runner. We saw another senior player, Trott, also leave the tour when the stress became too much for him. And so on. The leaders of that tour, the hapless Andy Flower and the introspectively inadequate Alastair Cook, were not blamed for the debacle. True Flower left having tried to hang on to his job, but he was kicked upstairs into a specially created and no doubt well paid sinecure at the ECB.

The "villain" of the piece post Ashes was Kevin Pietersen. England's leading batsman on the tour (not saying much, but true nevertheless) was the scapegoat for the failure. Here is not the place to revisit the Pietersen saga but it is right to point out that subsequent to Pietersen's dismissal, at home, and against much weaker opposition, England has performed almost as badly without him as they did in Australia with him. Clear evidence that it was not Kevin that was the problem, awkward sod that he sometimes was ! No, the problem is leadership.

In his seminal work "The Art of Captaincy" Mike Brearley said "... A leader or manager in any field, including sport, has to be able and willing to take in and think about the anxiety of those who work in the team."  The principal cause for anxiety in sport is failure, or expected failure. Trott and Swann reacted to anxiety by leaving the Ashes tour. Kevin Pietersen, allegedly, by behaving rather immaturely. And Flower and Cook ( no doubt aided and abetted by Graham Gooch and others) by mouthing platitudes about hard work. In a team sport there is double anxiety. Worry about individual performance and worry about the team. And when you are captain this is compounded. Anxiety for the captain in cricket comes because he is responsible, more than in any other sport, for the team's performance. And not just on the field. On the final day of the Lord's Test against India England in the shape of Joe Root and Moeen Ali batted responsibly for two hours, though Ali fell to the final ball of the morning. After lunch England batted like headless chickens and were rolled over playing dreadful shots. What happened in the lunch break? Did the captain tell the remaining players to ignore the Root/Ali approach and attack the bowling as if it was a T20 run chase?  Or did he say nothing at all and leave it to the batsmen to "express themselves"? Who knows?

After England's defeat in the fourth Ashes Test at Melbourne last December Alastair Cook was questioned by the media about his position as captain. This is a typical report after that press conference:

Cook made it clear he is no quitter, but understands judgments about his future as captain - little more than a year into his tenure - may yet be taken out of his hands. "I'm 100 per cent wanting to carry on. If someone makes that decision, and says 'we think there's a better man' or 'you're not good enough to do it' then I have to take that on the chin - because as a captain, you're responsible for the team."

That report is I think interesting in hindsight. Was it a cry for help from Cook in which, like Nixon, he said that he wasn't a quitter but that, also like Nixon, the decision was out of his hands? Public pressure and the threat of impeachment eventually dragged Nixon, kicking and screaming, from the Oval Office. Was Alastair Cook at Melbourne revealing that deep down he knew the game was up. That he expected to be sacked after the tour? And that deep down he probably thought that it would be right if it happened? If so the failure of leadership is not, subsequently, his failure but that of his masters in the ECB. If so Cook whilst sticking to the "I'm not a quitter" meme,  would probably have understood it if he had been sacked - and would probably been relieved that it had happened. The ECB had the chance to relieve Cook of a job for which he was unsuited and at the same time let him concentrate on his role as an opening batsman for which he most certainly was suited - and at which he had a proven track record.

The guilty party in this saga is the England and Wales Cricket Board. Their Chief Executive, David Collier, has recently resigned - the reasons for this are unclear and whether it is a reaction to recent failure I don't know - probably not. Mike Brearley in his great book tells the story of how he received a letter which said "There is an old Italian proverb: if you want to know that a fish is bad, look at its head". Well the head of the ECB is not David Collier, a capable apparatchik, but the Chairman Giles Clarke. The man who brought you Stanford. The man who took all live cricket off free-to-air television. The man who brought you £100+ Test Match tickets at Lord's, and plenty more. He's the head of the rotten fish that is English cricket - the man who takes all the decisions. (And the man who has conspired with the Board of a Control of a Cricket in India to take charge of world cricket - but that's another, and disreputable, story).

The non-quitting Alastair Cook stumbles on with personal and team failure compounding with every match. And the ECB is largely powerless to do anything about it because of their preposterous statement about "investing" in him and about "culture". "Loss of face" is not just something just from the East but alive and well at Lord's. As cricket fans we have no voice. We all like Cooky, but we all think that the time for him to go as captain is long overdue. Giles Clarke is in a corner but he's been there so often in the past that he'll escape. And English cricket will again suffer from his mountainous ego.