The fielding from both sides during the Twenty20 international at The Oval was of the highest class © Getty Images

England have at last managed to lose a cricket match, and a good thing too: it was getting monotonous. One catastrophic batting collapse is no cause for panic: Sri Lanka managed one in the summer's first Test, in Cardiff, back in May and everyone was suitably amused or embarrassed, but the world did not fall in for them. Similarly, I doubt that England are going to bat quite that badly on any kind of regular basis; there is no obvious reason to consider it as more than a blip.

Nevertheless, one might as well attempt to draw some wider lessons from the loss to West Indies.

First off, England's fielding continues to be high-class. There were a couple of fumbles and a couple of wild throws, so West Indies got half a dozen runs more than they should have, but generally speaking the ground fielding was sharp and the catching first-rate. That fielding was backing up some very satisfactory bowling by a correctly-selected bowling unit.

When Graeme Swann said that Swann the captain would not pick Swann the kid, he was incidentally confirming that it is still the skipper who makes the final decision on which ten allies are going to come out and play alongside him – and leaving James Anderson and Steven Finn on the bench while giving plenty of overs to Samit Patel, Scott Borthwick and Ravi Bopara showed an excellent appreciation of what was required on the Oval pitch on that day. I wonder whether Stuart Broad, the official captain, would have the same nous in either selection or on-field management of the attack.

The batting, though ….

Inexperience is perhaps a partial excuse. Ravi Bopara's 90 previous international caps were more than the rest of those selected primarily as batsmen had amassed together. When he failed, there was no-one with the experience of arresting a slide in the heightened atmosphere of representing the country at a packed ground – even if most of the young guns have done it in domestic games for sides in which their places are basically secure. There was a fair amount of experience lower down the order, though, not that it helped. When Tim Bresnan walked out, I thought that at least here was someone with the common sense to nurdle through at the required run-or-so-a-ball, but it only took him a couple of minutes to heave one unnecessarily down long-off's throat.

But inexperience is an inadequate excuse for being incapable.

Jos Buttler has not yet played an eye-catching innings in an international game, but I suspect it's only a matter of time: with Ben Stokes coming to the party on Sunday (even if he left early), all the other youngsters have proved that they are just as capable of hitting the ball several miles for England as for their counties. However, they also seem to be roughly as idiotic as some of the younger India players, holding to the ludicrous belief that if a delivery can't be hit over the boundary, it's not worth bothering with at all. Some of them will no doubt get chances to play limited-overs cricket for Engand in Asia over the next few months, mostly the 50-over variety where they will at least rub shoulders with senior players who know how to nurdle, from which one hopes they will learn.

But all of them, senior and junior, are less than expert at conjuring even the odd run, let alone boundaries, from balls which don't arrive at a decent pace and don't bounce to an inviting height.

The eventual returns of Kevin Pietersen and Eoin Morgan will improve matters slightly, but I reckon we England fans should watch the winter's ODIs through the tolerant eyes of the early adopters of technology. The first Blackberries or iPads didn't work all that well, but they were fun to get used to for those who didn't mind glitches and understood that they weren't going to get universal network coverage.

Turning to West Indies, they deserve great credit for doing what India couldn't in nine attempts this summer even though they face very similar problems with their own young batsmen, most of whom look even more clueless than the England boys.

But what will give them, and especially their coach, great heart is their superb outcricket, which gave England a very heavy dose of the medicine they have been dispensing themselves all summer: parsimonious bowling backed up by very sharp fielding. Darren Sammy's run out of Buttler was brilliant, but that was merely the star at the top of a bauble-festooned Christmas tree of fine fielding. The bowling was ideally suited to the conditions in terms of pace and length, and that England's top five were all bowled or lbw is eloquent testimony to its accuracy.

Pride, commitment and purpose when in the field is probably the most accurate barometer of a squad's morale and togetherness. That always comes from the leadership provided by the coach and, even more importantly, the captain: unless the players really want to play under them, there is no team – just eleven blokes turning up for something to do.

The turnaround in West Indies' fielding between the first and second games brought to mind the difference when England took the field for the third Test on their last tour of the Caribbean. It is now part of English cricket folklore that after the humiliating defeat in the first Test of that series Andrews Strauss and Flower, both very new in their respective roles, did an amazing job of getting their errant charges to think very seriously about how they were disrespecting the game, the country and themselves and what they were going to do about it.

Going on, Flower and Strauss had the advantage that they had a board and management structure which had been honed into supporting the international side as its top priority over a period of ten years, which is sadly not the case for Ottis Gibson and Darren Sammy. But the partnership they are developing looks to have the potential to do immense good. Let's hope they get to continue.

There have been false dawns from Ravi Bopara before, but maybe his recent performances will convince him that he can trust himself in international cricket © Associated Press

At last. The London ODIs produced interesting cricket, matches which could not be summed up in the five brutal words “England bowled well, India didn't.” And in such a high-profile series, once the professional vultures had swooped on the carcase of a match there was precious little else for an amateur England fan to find anything of interest to write, let alone read.

What with the overwhelming win in Australia, the beating of Sri Lanka and the crushing of India, it's pretty clear that the England Test team is in very good shape. There are some issues about backup spinner, wicketkeeper and opening bat, but otherwise it's the same task as faces a leading Formula One team: how to tune the mechanism to make it work even better.

The ODI team, though, is very much a work in progress – with “progress” being a highly apposite word. Alastair Cook has won his first two series as official England ODI captain against the runners-up and winners of the 2011 World Cup: pretty credit-worthy for the poorest of that tournament's quarter-finalists. I'm sure that World Cup fatigue, the IPL and favourable home conditions have been factors which undermined the visitors, but it's still more than a decent effort by England. For those of us inured to perpetual mediocrity, it's even possible to be mildly encouraged.

One very obvious encouragement is that this has not been the customary going through of motions following a brilliantly successful Test series from England. They have shown commitment and energy and an overpowering will to win. Messrs Duckworth and Lewis have probably been of considerable assistance in keeping the scoresheet clean, but even irritated Indian fans can probably allow that England's lower order put in heroic end-of-innings efforts which showed they were very serious indeed about these games.

Another big plus for England is that the Lord's tie and Oval win were achieved without any assistance from Kevin Pietersen or Eoin Morgan. Of course India were depleted too, but KP or Morgan or both have been mainsprings behind almost every win achieved in the last couple of years. Given the surrounding talent, Morgan is an even more important component in England's team than Sachin Tendulkar in India's, so for England to win games without them is a little more than surprising.

Doing something of the job Morgan normally does has been Ravi Bopara. I marked him as having England potential about five years ago and have been moderately in favour of his inclusion in Test and ODI teams, a faith which has been only semi-requited so far.

In these matches he has batted intelligently, manoeuvring the ball around the gaps with a close eye on the required D/L targets, in both cases guiding the team to within a couple of yards of the finish line. It would obviously be better if he didn't get out just before the end, but it's certainly better than getting out before he has reached double figures.

What has upped my rating of him considerably is the way he reached his fifty at Lord's. He had virtually committed himself to playing the paddle sweep, but was able at the last split second to adjust and glide it down to fine third man when he realised the ball was on the wrong line for his original shot.

That is true improvisation. A lot of nonsense gets spouted about how KP's unorthodox shots are terribly inventive, as though he thought them up on the spur of the moment when in reality he spends months trying them out and practicing them in the nets before essaying them in a real match. The same is just about true of Morgan, though I think a few of his shots are played entirely reactively.

But that one moment from Bopara convinced me at last that he has the spark of magic in him. It's a similar spark to that clearly possessed by the likes of MS Dhoni and Suresh Raina. I find Raina's style, if you can call it that, pretty ugly to watch, but it's extremely effective: it seems to consist of deciding where he's going to play a ball from and then bringing the middle of the bat into contact with it as hard as possible without much interest in the method of achieving it. In other words, almost entirely improvisational. No England batsman will ever be quite that free-and-easy because survival on English county pitches and the English weather require some attention to be paid to technique, but we need a few more batsmen not too restrained by orthodoxy.

With Morgan unavailable for some time, I would hope that Bopara will retain his place. There have been false dawns from him before, but maybe his recent performances will convince him that he can trust himself in international cricket. My theory is that his obvious nerviness has been down to a sense of puzzlement that his international performances have largely failed to live up to what he believes himself capable of rather than because he doesn't believe himself to be good enough. I'd like to hope that he is just about to deliver the return on all the investment that has been made in him for 60 previous ODIs.

However, the upcoming series in India is likely to expose rather painfully the major problem with England's ODI team. They are pretty good at bowling in the first half of the innings, but they have very little idea of what to do once the opposition start teeing off. Ryan ten Doeschate's and Kevin O'Brien's spectacular assaults during the World Cup have now been matched by the devastating hitting unleashed by Dhoni, Raina and Ravindra Jadeja; it is clear that Cook has no more idea about what tactics to use or what fields to set than his predecessor had and that even if he did, he doesn't have much in the way of bowlers who can follow the plan – at least, not with any useful effect.

The other big worry is how the batsmen will cope with the lack of pace in the subcontinent pitches. They are pretty good at working the ball around for the ones and twos but neither Ian Bell nor Jonathan Trott, in particular, are used to putting the muscle into their shots usually required for boundaries in India.

It's going to be a long climb for England to become a seriously respected 50-over outfit outside their own back yard.

Ouch. That's got to hurt. But will it leave a mark? © Getty Images

So I was watching the All Blacks play the Wallabies the other day. Given that this is the world’s premier cricket website, it might be necessary to reveal that those are the rugby union teams of New Zealand and Australia. It wasn’t so much watching them “play” each other as much as batter, maul, punch, thump, and make the best possible attempt to destroy, each other. For the uninitiated, international rugby is a hybrid of professional wrestling (minus the scripts) and American football. To say that it is brutal would be an understatement. Yet here are these 30-odd professional athletes, playing week in week out, with little or no drop in intensity and even less regard for their bodies, representing their countries, provinces and franchises.

It has always surprised me that there are not as many injuries in rugby as you might expect; which speaks volumes for the amazing adaptability and strength of the human body. I have never ceased to be amazed at the limits to which the body can be pushed, without irreparable damage being caused. Remarkable.

Which brings us to cricket, a game played by elite professional athletes, who make a pretty damn decent living, especially in the subcontinent. Given the general per capita incomes in, say, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Pakistan, cricketers are well paid in comparison. Especially given the lack of any sort of rival sport played at the same level. So one could be forgiven for assuming that their commitment to cricket should possibly be all-encompassing. In a day and age where the average white-collar worker spends a minimum of eight hours behind a desk, cricketers ought to, we assume, spend a similar amount of the day on matters associated to cricket.

A bowler or a batsman can’t possibly spend more than a couple of hours in the nets at a time. Even if this is done twice a day when not playing matches, that still leaves a considerable amount of time to hit the gym. Which is not something that players from the subcontinent seem to be all that worried about. Surely, if they were concerned about it, the likes of Ramesh Powar and Thilina Kandamby wouldn’t exist in their current proportions? The fact that you can be among your country’s elite athletes and still be in such upsetting shape is an indictment of the culture of fitness that surrounds the game of cricket, most particularly in Asia.

Take a look at Shane Watson. A towering brickhouse of a man, who said during his mammoth innings of 185 not out against Bangladesh earlier this year that he started whacking sixes because he was feeling a little too tired to run. He hit 15 (and as many fours). Thirty boundaries from a man who admitted to being knackered. Even Sanath Jayasuriya in his pomp would have baulked at that sort of power-hitting. Foremost among the modern Asian crash-bang-wallopers are Jayasuriya, Afridi, and to a lesser extent Dhoni. All three men are exceptionally strong. Jayasuriya has Popeye-like forearms, while Afridi packs a Pathan punch.

While watching endless reruns of games from previous World Cups in the lead-up to this year’s edition, I couldn’t help but notice the power and grace of the young IVA Richards. Beneath the white shirt and the skin-tight trousers, the bulging muscles are hard to miss. Richards’ destructiveness is legendary, but not many would attribute that to his physical superiority in an era where Mike Gatting and David Boon were not considered entirely misshapen.

“Get to the blinking point,” I hear you urge, with not unreasonable consternation. My point, simply, is that cricket is a physical game. And as long as we keep shying away from that, Asians will win World Cups on dirt tracks and teams with big, strong players will win everything else. It’s no coincidence that the all-conquering England team are playing so well at the moment. They are a well-drilled unit, who not only look good skill-wise, but also physically. Andrew Strauss bulked up considerably over the last winter. Alastair Cook now looks like a Backstreet Boy with muscles, and the likes of Jimmy Anderson have toughened up. Chris Tremlett is also an archetypal specimen, and Kevin Pietersen’s physical prowess is obvious.

It didn’t need Andrew Flintoff to point it out, but the Indian team’s almost complete failure on the physical front contributed in no small measure to their results on the disastrous tour of England. The injury to Zaheer Khan was typical of the apathy that many (though not all) Asian players show for their fitness. Sourav Ganguly’s aversion to running was rumoured to have ticked Greg Chappell off. Non-contact injuries are usually preventable with proper preparation, warming up and cooling down.

Sri Lanka have also faced their share of injuries recently, with some fast bowlers breaking down. This is mainly because the young lads don’t look after themselves when they are playing through the age groups, and break down in the high-intensity environs of international cricket.

It is probably time for Asian batsmen to shed the mindset of being primarily “touch” players, who use their delicate wrists to such good effect, and hit the gym. Naturally, a Mahela Jayawardene will never emerge from the bowels of the gymnasium looking like Watson, but it probably wouldn’t hurt if he bulked up a bit. Kumar Sangakkara is Sri Lanka’s best batsman and has, among other things, his tennis-playing forearms to thank for his power and dexterity. Strength won’t slow you down and stiffen you up. It’ll help you hit sixes. Really, it will. The evidence is overwhelming.

It’s time coaches and physios of subcontinental teams realised that they probably need to increase the proportions of strength- and fitness work they do with their teams. In a region where players are more naturally talented, arguably, than their Caucasian cousins, it would be criminal not to keep up with the physical demands of modern cricket. The relationship between strength and skill is a symbiotic one. It’s time to get on yer bikes, mates.