James Lawton: Trescothick's response to failure shows no character

There are some who speak of Marcus Trescothick as a future captain of England, but you have to wonder how well such speculation will survive his current ambition "to get cricket out of my system, eat and drink so much I turn into a fat bastard – and sleep for a year."

The lot of an English cricketer, heaven knows, has has not been easy over the last six months. Saddled with a hellish itinerary in Australia, besieged, and found seriously wanting, in the political controversies of the World Cup, it is understandable that Trescothick and his team-mates currently do not exactly feel like gods of the sporting universe.

But it seems that when the going gets tough for English cricketers, even those of them with an apparently glittering future, they do not so much get going as turn into something which has all the robust consistency of tomato purée.

After a meteoric rise, Trescothick has experienced his first trough of form. When Mike Atherton suffered such crises, which were almost invariably accompanied by severe back pain, he tended to grind it out in the nets. By way of contrast, Trescothick reports: "My head was spinning with all the advice I was getting, some from people in the bar I hadn't seen for 20 years." Passing thought: no one ever repositioned himself as a world-class performer in the bar, except perhaps the late Richard Harris or Oliver Reed. Nor is it done by sleeping for a year after eating and drinking yourself into a fat bastard.

Endlessly, we talk about the weaknesses of the structure of English cricket: the numbing mediocrity of the country game, the feebleness of committee thinking and the refusal to hand leadership unequivocally to a strong man who can then be judged on results. It is idle to pretend, however, that there is not a problem with the collective character of the English player.

Nasser Hussain, it is hoped, will retain the Test captaincy. His competitive nature is fierce, and widely praised even by Australians. He, like Trescothick, is clearly out of sorts with his game and to a degree himself. But among his options he has not yet mentioned a year's flatulent hibernation. For this, I suppose, we should feel grateful.