England's zombie World Cup history

Peter Moores may not have wanted to look at the data later but his apocryphal utterance after England's shambolic exit from the 2015 World Cup has, in the finest cricket tradition, taken on a life of its own. Like Steve Waugh's "You've just dropped the World Cup, mate" or Brian Johnston's "The bowler's Holding, the batsman's Willey", Moores supposedly needing a numerical breakdown of how England dropped their bundle against Bangladesh looks set to enter the canon.

It has been debunked before, and the authors of 28 Days' Data, a dissection of England's failings at the last six World Cups, readily explain the "crackly radio line" that led to Moores being misquoted by the BBC in their prologue to the book. A prologue entitled "We'll have to look at the data." In a book named after the length of England's disastrous campaign (28 days) and, yes, the D-A-T-A. Moores seems a very forgiving man but he is not going to hear the end of this one.

He is just one of many former England players and coaches that Peter Miller and Dave Tickner (who you might know better as @TheCricketGeek and @tickerscricket) spoke to in putting together 28 Days' Data, which features another infamously iconic moment from England's white-ball history on the cover: Nasser Hussain raising three fingers at the Lord's media centre. The book title is based on a film about a rage-inducing virus that turns people into zombies; no further explanation needed.

But what caused the contagion? What turned England from the bright-eyed World Cup finalists of 1992 to the dead-men-stumbling who were knocked out in the first group stage when the tournament returned to Australia and New Zealand 23 years later? The most recent edition was so bad that Miller and Tickner liken it to "a Greatest Hits compilation, and there is definitely a lost consonant there somewhere".

There is quite a back catalogue to get through and the formula chosen is straightforward: visit each debacle in turn and talk to those involved. The initial fall was swift. Four years on from a strong side, led by Graham Gooch, being beaten by Imran Khan's "cornered tigers", England belatedly discovered the world was playing a different game - literally, in some cases, with England's home ODIs still taking place in daylight with white clothes, a red ball and different fielding restrictions to those in other parts of the world.

Preparation was also an issue (and was to become a theme). The 1996 World Cup was played in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka - so naturally England had not been to the subcontinent for three years previously. While Sri Lanka, the eventual winners, were tearing up the place with Sanath Jayasuriya and Romesh Kaluwitharana at the top of the order, England's nod to innovation was to open (in three of their six games) with Neil Smith, the Warwickshire offspinner and occasional pinch-hitter best remembered for a cheeky on-pitch vomit, who had played a grand total of two ODIs going into the tournament.

This was all before you bring the coach, Raymond Illingworth, and his eccentricities into the equation. "I think we probably made the most of what we had," begins Illingworth in a rambling, reflective quote, during which he says he had "played a lot more one-day cricket" than the captain, Michael Atherton, criticises Atherton's field placings and the bowlers bowling short and then concludes: "We could have made better use of what we had."

England making poor use of what little they had was the recurring problem, and most supporters will be familiar with the zesty collection of cock-ups that follows. The experiment with Adam Hollioake as a specialist one-day captain (appointed after five games, led England to victory in Sharjah, reign over inside a year) provided a brief glimpse of how things might have been, before the ECB went back to picking Test-shaped players to fill ODI-shaped holes - notably replacing Nick Knight with Hussain as opener (a role he had never performed before) on the eve of the 1999 World Cup.

England, the hosts, were of course eliminated before the official World Cup song was even released (a song, incidentally, that Dave Stewart quietly repurposed for the Jackie Chan film Around the World in 80 Days a few years later). As Miller and Tickner put it: "They had not only reverted to type, they had become more English than ever. It was verging on self-parody."

No one, inevitably, looks back on any of England's limited-overs floundering during the 1990s and 2000s with much fondness. Unfortunately, while the pathology was consistent and the diagnoses fairly unanimous (England didn't accord one-day cricket the same status as Tests, and were therefore doomed to repeat the same mistakes), that means there is not too much fresh light to shed. Andrew Strauss admits to errors in selection going into the 2011 World Cup, when England suddenly replaced Steven Davies with Matt Prior - "that sent shockwaves through the team" - and then subsequently took a punt on an untried Kevin Pietersen as opener, but such revelations don't quite qualify as English cricket's version of The X-Files.

Strauss may, however, have helped concoct the antidote, with his insistence since taking over as England's director of cricket on treating the white-ball formats seriously. That has underpinned their startling renaissance since the Alpha-and-Omega failure last year. Moores gamely suggests the scale of that humiliation was the "best thing that happened" and seems to include his own removal from the coaching job among reasons to be optimistic. Whether the serum has a lasting effect, we are yet to find out; if not, expect 28 Days' Data: Reanimated to be an even angrier sequel.

28 Days' Data
Peter Miller and Dave Tickner
Pitch Publishing
352 pages, £9.99