It’s a tricky old time for cricket. The collapse of England’s World Cup white-ballers – and how they have managed to run up the white flag with quite such aplomb – is one of the great sporting mysteries of our time. One day they are the best in the world and hot favourites; the next they have soured overnight, like a pint of milk left out for too long.

Answers on a postcard please, as Ben Stokes admitted. English cricket has never travelled particularly well, which may have something to do with the conditions here being very different from those in nearly all the other top cricketing nations. England breeds lots of very good medium pacers who can swing and seam the ball in home conditions; overseas they find the ball stubbornly stays on a dead straight trajectory from the hand to the meat of the opponent’s bat and from there with a resounding thwack into the stands.

And what works on a flat pitch on a sunny day at Lord’s often doesn’t on a Bunsen on a hazy day in Calcutta. Then again, as Moeen Ali said, ‘We’ve just been rubbish throughout.’ No argument there, Mo. English cricket has also made a lifelong study of neglecting spinners, who have shown their immense worth for other nations contesting this World Cup.

I think it is unlikely England will field a whole new XI when they resume white ball cricket after the World Cup. There don’t seem to be many names in the current Lions squad on a training camp in the UAE fit to take the places of Joe Root, Jos Buttler or Stokes himself, though Mike Atherton’s son, the Middlesex spinner Josh de Caires, has promise to burn and should be wheeling away for England before long. Clearly Harry Brook, Zak Crawley, Ben Duckett and Ollie Pope would have made a better fist of things than the failures who have been playing in India.

You might think that Formula 1 racing these days is just a sure cure for insomnia. That’s not what they are thinking in Las Vegas though, where the Vegas Grand Prix makes its grandiose debut next weekend. The race, which incorporates ‘The Strip’, starts at 10 p.m. local time on a Saturday night on a track lined with concrete barriers that has taken months to build.

The ticket prices are astronomical. For as little as £17,500 a head you get the chance for some pit walkabouts as well as ‘limitless food and drinks’. Nice. I can think of a few ways to spend 17.5 grand, and they don’t include watching a two-hour race at the tail end of a championship that was won a month ago. Thanks to Netflix, Formula 1 might be more popular than ever but the core product could not be worse. Think of what has been built in Vegas, for how much and at what disruption, all for the chance to see Max Verstappen winning.

This Vegas experiment might anyway be a step too far. F1 didn’t work in Vegas in the early 1980s – on a track built in Caesars Palace car park – and when it took place in Phoenix in the late 1980s, a nearby ostrich race drew a bigger crowd.

Pursed lips at the weekend from some of the country’s most illustrious commentators claiming that Luton fans let their club down by singing ‘Always the victims/ Never your fault’ to Liverpool supporters. There’s been bad blood between Luton and Liverpool since Kenny Dalglish, ever the ray of sunshine, made clear his feelings about the ground. Luton qualified for Europe by winning the League Cup in 1988.

They couldn’t go though, because all English clubs were banned from Europe following the Heysel disaster. I know where my sympathies lie, however much Liverpool are trying to educate the fans about tragedy chanting.