Alastair Cook is enduring an experience I would not wish on my worst enemy. He will not be able to sleep at night and when he eventually drifts off and wakes up in the morning the last and first things going through his mind will be worries over his career and his job.
But he should do what is right for England and resign the captaincy. He has shown he does not have the tactical brain to lead the side.
England badly miss Cook the opening batsman scoring 150 to set games up at the top of the order and, relieved of the captaincy, I don’t think it is too late for him to rediscover this form.
I said last year I thought he could compete with Sachin Tendulkar in terms of career runs. Perhaps this was an unfair comparison but I did and still do hope Cooky can live up to it.
He could have another 10 years left but his batting requires emergency help and he needs to speak to someone away from the England set-up. He has to be honest with himself.
I had an issue with left-arm spin so went to seek advice from others. I spoke to Indians, the best players of spin in the world, and asked them how I could solve it. I spoke to people in the Indian Premier League, spent hours on the phone and communicated via email with coaches and players.
In order to change and get better Cook is going to have to accept there are straight shooters out there who will tell him to his face he has a problem. In the long run they can help him.
He is 6ft 3in and a strong, stocky guy. He should be batting like Matthew Hayden. He should not stand there and let medium pacers bowl him half-volleys all day long and get him out. Someone of his size, strength, ability and with his eye should be hitting half-volleys for four all day.
Teams are not bowling short to him because they know he can cut and pull but they have found out his weakness on the front foot, which is why they are bowling full.
My recommendation is that he phones someone such as Graham Ford. He would love to help because he is a giving and caring man and I know what he has done for my batting. Two or three years ago I was struggling with scoring hundreds and he picked out straightaway that my head was not in position.
Look at Cook’s head when he is nicking off at the moment. It is above or behind his front knee. He is not heading down the ground and a strong guy like that opening the innings with a build like Hayden should be hitting the ball straight. The cover drive is the easiest shot in the world to play. Every kid can do it so why not someone as talented as Cook? Batting is all about hitting balls in straight lines. A guy who has scored 25 Test hundreds can change his game slightly and start driving off the front foot.
There is hope. He is a popular guy so people will want to help him out and at 29 you do not lose everything. You take a couple of months out and find a new game. He then comes back and starts hitting medium pacers through the covers and half-volleys down the ground and suddenly opposition teams think, “Oh no he has cracked it”. Problem solved and Cook is now scoring runs for England again. But it will take help from elsewhere to solve this problem.
Cricket engulfs your whole life. If you play well, your mood is better, you are much more outspoken and confident in the dressing room. Anybody not performing thinks he is letting the team down and as captain you feel that twice as much. When he is playing well Cooky is lovely and relaxed but he is a worrier, something I saw in 2010 when he was struggling against Pakistan and there was a lot of speculation he would be left out of the side.
It is more complex for him now. The hardest issue for him to deal with is concerns over his tactical expertise. His batting has been under the microscope before. He knows how to deal with that. But captaincy is different, especially now he has lost his right-hand man in Matt Prior.
Cook needs people with experience of international cricket around him, which Peter Moores and Paul Farbrace lack.
Look at Marvan Atapattu working with Sri Lanka, Rahul Dravid with India, Shane Warne with Australia. How many ex-international players have England had recently working with them? None. There is so much knowledge in English cricket going to waste.
At the Adelaide Test match I saw Mark Taylor and Ian Healy in the Aussie dressing room during the match. Would any of our commentators have been welcomed in our dressing room? I doubt it.
There are so many great cricket brains in the Sky studios. Put that radio in your ear, listen to them on the balcony or in the dressing room and Mike Atherton, Nasser Hussain, Warne or whoever could be saying something you didn’t know and could implement in the game.
When the next captain is appointed I hope he embraces change. Who could do it? Ian Bell has a good tactical brain and if given the responsibility in the right environment he could grow into the role really well. At the moment he is not scoring runs but sometimes handing a leadership role to an individual who worries about his place in the team can change their mindset. They know they will not be dropped and it takes the pressure off their batting.
When Andrew Strauss took over from me he was not in the one-day side. He was made captain and started scoring runs straightaway because he stopped having to justify his place in the team.
I have always liked Joe Root. As soon as he came into the side he stood up for himself. So I think he has got it but 23 is very young. I don’t know if he could handle the job at this age but I am really pleased he is doing well.
At the moment only politics are keeping Cook in a job because the England and Wales Cricket Board backed him so much that it would be yet another PR disaster if it sacked him now. But the ECB needs his runs back more than anything else so a big decision has to be made. Forget the bad headlines for once.
Twenty20 has been a hard slog for me
Surrey have asked me if I can play championship cricket in September when Tillakaratne Dilshan goes home and I will play two matches towards the end of the season to hopefully help the club to promotion.
I have found it hard to find form in Twenty20 cricket. It is very difficult when you only play once a week. At the IPL you play three or four times a week and you are in a routine with a team playing just Twenty20. But the nature of the Twenty20 here means you play once a week so you have to go into an innings and whack the ball straight away.
On some days I have felt as good as ever, on other days I have not known which side of the bat to hold. The system here might be bringing in the crowds but for the guys who play Twenty20 only it is hard.
I train on a Thursday but usually with the second team because the first team have been playing a championship match and need a break. It leaves me with only an hour before the game on a Friday to work on my batting with Graham Ford. Batting is all about practice. At the moment an hour before the game is not enough.
This blog was provided by the Telegraph