NOW THAT ENGLAND are bottom of the pile of Test countries, by almost any reckoning, the talk is of getting back to the top. Lord MacLaurin has stated that England must become number one or two. Nothing less will do than returning to that glorious era when every school-boy could look at the globe in his class-room and reflect that just as Britannia ruled the waves, so did England rule the world at cricket.

There has, in fact, been only one period when England have been champions of the Test match game. Before 1928 there was nobody to be champions over except Australia and South Africa, and as soon as West Indies, India, and New Zealand were granted Test status, Don Bradman arrived to dominate the next two decades. So it was not until England had recovered from the Second World War, and Bradman had retired, that they became supreme in the mid-fifties, and remained so until the late fifties. All who came to England were conquered then: 3–1 over Australia in 1956; 3–0 over West Indies in 1957; 4–0 over New Zealand in 1958 as England won the first four Tests of a rubber for the first time; 5–0 against India in 1959 as England made a clean sweep of a full Test series for the first time; and 3–2 over South Africa in 1955 and 3–0 in 1960.

Dream team: England have rarely had it better than at the 1953 Oval Test against Australia. Back row (l-r): Trevor Bailey, Peter May, Tom Graveney, Jim Laker, Tony Lock, Johnny Wardle (12th man), Fred Trueman. Sitting: Bill Edrich, Alec Bedser, Len Hutton, Denis Compton, Godfrey Evans

Those were the days and years! We have only to return to those wonderful times – when men were men and beer was beer, when pitches were uncovered and Fred Trueman and Brian Statham regularly rolled over Australia– for all to be right with the world again, or rather for England to be right on top of the world again. Most followers of English cricket either saw the second half of the 1950s for themselves or have heard from their parents about Colin Cowdrey and Ted Dexter, Tom Graveney and Ken Barrington, Jim Laker and Tony Lock, Godfrey Evans and Trevor Bailey, all under the captaincy of Peter May. The reminiscences of Trueman and Bailey themselves on Test Match special have helped to reinforce the view that this was the Golden Age. But is it right that our expectations should be based upon this period alone, or fair on the current generation that they should be? And was this age actually as 24-carat as we have come to believe?

When we were kings: Trueman hits Worrell at Edgbaston in 1957. below Hutton catches South Africa's George Fullerton for a duck at Old Trafford in 1951

Two members of England's 1958 team, Evans and Bailey, had more caps between them then the whole of the New Zealand side

In my reading of Test cricket history, the playing field has been level only since 1980 and World Series Cricket. Before then the Australians were semi-professional, paid when they played but not otherwise; and every other country had weekend amateur cricketers to pit against England's professionals (and even if their captain was nominally an amateur he was still a fulltime cricketer). Before World Series Cricket, which led to every Test team becoming professional, Test cricket was not a level playing field. Except for Ashes series, when England played most other countries it was Men against Boys in terms of experience and preparation – sometimes Boys who were playing on a live grass pitch for the first time.

Take the difference between the 1999 New Zealanders, who beat England, and those 1958 New Zealanders whom England hammered. The strength of the earlier team was the natural forte of Kiwi cricket: seam bowling backed by athletic fielding. Tony MacGibbon was the equivalent of Chris Cairns or Dion Nash: indeed, on the uncovered pitches of one of the wettest of English seasons, MacGibbon had even better figures of 20 wickets at 19 in the five Tests. He had seam-bowling support as well, but no batting support at all.

When New Zealand went into the first Test of the 1958 series – at Edgbaston, as it was 41 years later – it would be stretching a point to say they were on a roll. They had won their previous Test match, but as it had taken place more than two years before, the impetus had been slightly dissipated. That victory, moreover, against a below-strength West Indian side missing two out of three Ws, was the only one in their history to date, in 45 Tests. And if the tourists had not been given much of an international programme to build up for their visit to England, their domestic programme was not extensive either: in those days their six provincial teams played each other once, around Christmas and New Year when the players could get time off work, and that was it.

Two members of the England team, Evans and Bailey, had more Test caps between them than the whole of New Zealand's team at Edgbaston that year. Of the tourists' top six batsmen in that match, three of them were making their Test debuts – one of them was 19, another had never made a first-class hundred, and the third was a London club player who had tried and failed to qualify for Kent. A fourth batsman, Noel Harford, had played four Tests out of eight in a career in which he averaged 15, and a fifth, Lawrie Miller, was halfway through a career of 13 Tests in which he averaged 13. Miller was 35, and so set in his ways that John Arlott, in his Cricket Journal of the 1958 season, describes a passage of the Lord's Test when `to ball after ball, Miller moved in front of his stumps and attempted to turn Trueman to leg'. Their sixth batsman at Edgbaston was John Reid, their captain and the only one who could be described as man not boy, as Bert Sutcliffe was absent with a broken wrist. In the five Tests, New Zealand put together only one total higher than 161, and five of under 100.

In the entire series the highest individual innings for New Zealand was 66 by Tony MacGibbon at Old Trafford. At Edgbaston, then as this year, most of England's batting was embarrassingly poor in their first innings except for a partnership between May (84) and Cowdrey (81), but they got away with being dismissed for 221 by tea on the opening day because New Zealand batted even more poorly, deficient in skill and in the experience which their professional successors of 1999 had been able to accumulate. In winning the Headingley Test by an innings, England lost only two wickets. Tony Lock took 34 wickets in the series at seven runs each. Most efficient cricket by England, and well played. But Like against Like it was not.

 BEFORE 1980 South Africa and West Indies, in addition to Australia, often gave England a good hard game, especially in their own countries and when England did not send full-strength touring teams. Here again, however, a major consideration has to be made. Before their readmission in 1992 South Africa did not select from their full population, only a small proportion of it. In exonerating the 1958 New Zealanders, Arlott forgave them for not being of Australian or West Indian playing strength: `How could they be expected to attain that standard from the weekend cricket of a population no bigger than that of Greater Liverpool?' And the size of South Africa's English-speaking, cricket-playing population of the time was little larger. Not even the Afrikaans population has been deeply involved in cricket until the present generation.

The politics of race had a similar impact on West Indian cricket, handicapping it to England's advantage. England did not lose at home to West Indies before 1950, and no wonder: each touring team had to include a quorum of white players, partly because they were white and partly because they were affluent enough to save an impoverished Board some money by paying their own expenses. Claude Wight was vice-captain of the 1928 West Indian touring team. His qualification? Son of the Board's treasurer and studying in England.

Even as late as 1957 the politics of race were weakening West Indies – and strengthening England. On their previous tour in 1950 John Goddard, the captain, had been a modest contributor with bat and ball but had not been exposed because of the three Ws and Ramadhin and Valentine. Seven years on, then aged 38, he averaged 16 with the bat in the Test series and 14 in all first-class matches, and took two Test wickets with his offbreaks. It would be fair to deduce from this distance that the 1957 West Indians lost three of their Tests in three days not just because of Lock and Laker but because they had to play under a captain who was not worth his place and who had been appointed largely because he was white. And Goddard's decline was not exposed before the 1957 tour because West Indies had no domestic competition from the days of the white planters until the creation of the Shell Shield (now the Busta Cup) in 1965–66.

Before 1980 the only true measure of England's strength was their Test cricket against Australia. Only their Ashes series were staged on a level playing field between Like and Like. And it is upon these performances that we should base our assessment of England's natural strength, and our expectations of their present and future teams.

 England have been the equal of Australia at home overall: they have won 40 Tests against Australia's 41 in England. We should however take into account England's clear superiority in the 19th century: then they defeated Australia at Lord's three times, in comparison with once in the whole of the 20th century. In Australia England have won 53 Test matches to Australia's 76; and if you discount England's 1978–79 victories against the Packer-less Australians, which you would be justified in doing, the score stands at 48–75.

 England have beaten the Australians in Australia when they have had a great bowler, normally a great fast bowler like Harold Larwood, Frank Tyson or John Snow, with Sydney Barnes the medium-paced exception. Only then, as a rule, have England been able to overcome the inbuilt superiority of Australia in their own conditions. Never have England produced a wrist-spinner who has won an Ashes series in Australia or in England. It is simply not in the nature of the English beast, and we should recognise it, and in doing so modify our expectations of Chris Schofield to reasonable proportions. The mind-set which believes that England have traditionally been great, on a level playing field, is partly based on myth.

To demythologise further, Trueman and Statham only once in their distinguished careers played together in an England side which defeated Australia– at Melbourne in 1962–63. And in the 1958 season Trueman delivered 131.5 overs for England, and 347.3 overs for Yorkshire. He took 77 wickets at astonishingly low cost, and it was a very wet summer; nevertheless his workload for county and country was little more than half that of Andy Caddick's in the 1999 season.

It is right that England should expect, but not too much.

Turning the tables: West Indian fans celebrate their team's 5–0 win in 1984. left Bob Bennett, Graham Gooch and Keith Fletcher bemoan England's ill-fated tour of India in 1992–93. below Chris Schofield: `Never have England produced a wrist-spinner who has won an Ashes series'

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