As history shows, things can only get better for Joe Root's battered and bruised England

Joe Root’s bally men can take some solace from England’s darkest hours in years gone by, as they’ve often sparked more fruitful results

The current winless away run currently stands at 12 painful games (Getty)

Of all the weeks to get steamrolled for 58, Joe Root’s England picked their moment. It’s fair to say the ‘BANcroft’ saga has offered a shiny new play toy for the media magpies to dance around while England try to regroup ahead of Thursday’s Test in Christchurch.

England’s dismal form will undoubtedly be of huge concern, though, as New Zealand focus on securing what would be their first series win over England in nearly 20 years. The batting frailty so ruthlessly exposed at Auckland threw a table cloth over another bowling display lacking in both bite and bark.

Joe Root’s bally men can take some solace from England’s darkest hours in years gone by, as they’ve often sparked more fruitful results.

Kingston, Jamaica, 2009. Case in point. Jerome Taylor goes bonkers and Sulieman Benn slings down his darts from a height of 10ft as England crumble to 51 all out, going on to lose the Wisden Trophy 1-0. The shock defeat came in the aftermath of the very public felling of coach Peter Moores and Kevin Pieterson’s timely abdication from the England captaincy throne.

The media were kind enough to pull their punches given the difficulty of the task facing new coach and captain duo, Andy Flower and Andrew Strauss. “This was an utter disgrace,” remarked Steve James in The Telegraph.

The series against the West Indies started badly and continued in a similar vein. The second test at Antigua was abandoned after 1.7 overs, as the sandy ground appeared better suited to hosting beach volleyball than a Test match.

England then missed out on victory by one wicket in the third game and two in the fifth, leaving the Caribbean feeling royally conned.

England lost the series against West Indies 1-0 (Getty)

Born from that adversity was a period which stands as one of England’s most successful in recent years, as they went on to win eight out of the next ten Test series home and away.

Among those series wins was the first away Ashes victory in 24 years. Heady days that now seem like a distant past.

The current winless away run currently stands at 12 painful games since victory in the first Test against Bangladesh in late 2016. Christchurch will prove a test of whether England’s selectors truly believe the present XI is capable of arresting the current mudslide.

And whilst ex-players deserve to have their voices heard, those who played in the late 1980s will do well to remember that England had an even longer winless run, on home soil, between 1986 and 1988, broken only by a solitary win against Sri Lanka.

The winter woes have yielded some cause for optimism, as much as we enjoy refusing to emerge from the doom and gloom as a cricketing public. Ask any Australian fan from the 1990s/2000s, it gets boring beating everyone.

The only way is up for England from here (Getty)

Dawid Malan has shown such promise, repaying the selectors’ faith after being flung in to the team off the back of a single T20I fifty against South Africa last summer. Mark Stoneman, too, has shown the necessary grit he’ll need if he’s to go on and make the other opener’s spot his for some time.

Moeen Ali’s failure to back up what was an unbelievable English summer in 2017 can only be tolerated for so long, with Jack Leach throwing increasingly bigger stones at the window in his bid to win a richly deserved test berth.

The quote defining insanity as ‘doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results’ is a popular one, despite the conjecture over whether Albert Einstein, Mark Twain or an ancient Chinese proverb should get the credit for it.

In England’s case, failure to turn the tide in Christchurch will likely see patience run out for some ahead of this summer’s first Test against Pakistan in May.