If there were global justice, Nato would be in the dock over Libya

Liberia's Charles Taylor has been convicted of war crimes, so why not the western leaders who escalated Libya's killing?

• 
• • Seumas Milne
  • guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 15 May 2012 22.20 BST

Illustration by Belle Mellor

Libya was supposed to be different. The lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan had been learned, David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy insisted last year. This would be a real humanitarian intervention. Unlike Iraq, there would be no boots on the ground. Unlike in Afghanistan, Nato air power would be used to support a fight for freedom and prevent a massacre. Unlike the Kosovo campaign, there would be no indiscriminate cluster bombs: only precision weapons would be used. This would be a war to save civilian lives.

Seven months on from Muammar Gaddafi's butchering in the ruins of Sirte, the fruits of liberal intervention in Libya are now cruelly clear, and documented by the UN and human rights groups: 8,000 prisoners held without trial, rampant torture and routine deaths in detention, the ethnic cleansing of Tawerga, a town of 30,000 mainly black Libyans (already in the frame as a crime against humanity) and continuing violent persecution of sub-Saharan Africans across the country.

A year after the western powers tried to make up for lost ground in the Arab uprisings by tipping the balance of the Benghazi-led revolt, Libya is in the lawless grip of rival warlords and armed conflict between militias, as the western-installed National Transitional Council (NTC) passes Gaddafi-style laws clamping down on freedom of speech, gives legal immunity to former rebels and disqualifies election candidates critical of the new order. These are the political forces Nato played the decisive role in bringing to power.

Now the evidence is starting to build up of what Nato's laser-guided bombing campaign actually meant on the ground. The New York-based Human Rights Watch this week released a report into the deaths of at least 72 Libyan civilians, a third of them children, killed in eight separate bombing raids (seven on non-military targets) – and denounced Nato for still refusing to investigate or even acknowledge civilian deaths that were always denied at the time.

Given the tens of thousands of civilians killed by US, British and other Nato forces both from the air and on the ground in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen over the last decade, perhaps Nato commanders prefer not to detain themselves with such comparative trifles. And Human Rights Watch believes that, whatever the real number of civilians directly killed by Nato bombing, it was relatively low given the 10,000-odd sorties flown.

But while Nato's UN mandate was to protect civilians, the alliance in practice turned that mission on its head. Throwing its weight behind one side in a civil war to oust Gaddafi's regime, it became the air force for the rebel militias on the ground. So while the death toll was perhaps between 1,000 and 2,000 when Nato intervened in March, by October it was estimated by the NTC to be 30,000 – including thousands of civilians.

We can't of course know what would have happened without Nato's bombing campaign, even if there is no evidence that Gaddafi had either the intention or capability to carry out a massacre in Benghazi. But we do know that Nato provided decisive air cover for the rebels as they matched Gaddafi's forces war crime for war crime, carried out massacres of their own and indiscriminately shelled civilian areas with devastating results – such as reduced much of Sirte to rubble last October.

There were also Nato and Qatari boots on the ground, including British special forces, co-ordinating rebel operations. So Nato certainly shared responsibility for the deaths of many more civilian than its missiles directly incinerated.

That is the kind of indirect culpability that led to the conviction last month of Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia, in the UN-backed special court for Sierra Leone in The Hague. Taylor, now awaiting sentence and expected to be jailed in Britain, was found guilty of "aiding and abetting" war crimes and crimes against humanity during Sierra Leone's civil war in the 1990s. But he was cleared of directly ordering atrocities carried out by Sierra Leonean rebels.

Which pretty well describes the role played by Nato in Libya last year. International lawyers say legal culpability would depend on the degree of assistance and knowledge of war crimes for which Nato provided cover, even if the political and moral responsibility could not be clearer.

But there is of course simply no question of Nato leaders being held to legal account for the Libyan carnage, any more than they have been for far more direct crimes carried out in Iraq and Afghanistan. The only Briton convicted of a war crime over the bloodbath of Iraq has been Corporal Donald Payne, for abuse of prisoners in Basra in 2003. While George Bush has boasted of authorising the international crime of torture and faced not so much as a caution.

Which only underlines that what is called international law simply doesn't apply to the big powers or their political leaders. In the 10 years of its existence, the International criminal court has indicted 28 people from seven countries for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Every single one of them is African – even though ICC signatories include war-wracked states such as Colombia and Afghanistan.

That's rather as if the criminal law in Britain only applied to people earning the minimum wage and living in Cornwall. But so long as international law is only used against small or weak states in the developing world, it won't be a system of international justice, but an instrument of power politics and imperial enforcement.

Just as the urgent lesson of Libya – for the rest of the Arab world and beyond – is that however it is dressed up, foreign military intervention isn't a short cut to freedom. And far from saving lives, again and again it has escalated slaughter.

The Crisis of European Democracy

by Amartya Sen

IF proof were needed of the maxim that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the economic crisis in Europe provides it. The worthy but narrow intentions of the European Union’s policy makers have been inadequate for a sound European economy and have produced instead a world of misery, chaos and confusion. 

There are two reasons for this.

First, intentions can be respectable without being clearheaded, and the foundations of the current austerity policy, combined with the rigidities of Europe’s monetary union (in the absence of fiscal union), have hardly been a model of cogency and sagacity. Second, an intention that is fine on its own can conflict with a more urgent priority — in this case, the preservation of a democratic Europe that is concerned about societal well-being. These are values for which Europe has fought, over many decades.

Certainly, some European countries have long needed better economic accountability and more responsible economic management. However, timing is crucial; reform on a well-thought-out timetable must be distinguished from reform done in extreme haste. Greece, for all of its accountability problems, was not in an economic crisis before the global recession in 2008. (In fact, its economy grew by 4.6 percent in 2006 and 3 percent in 2007 before beginning its continuing shrinkage.)

The cause of reform, no matter how urgent, is not well served by the unilateral imposition of sudden and savage cuts in public services. Such indiscriminate cutting slashes demand — a counterproductive strategy, given huge unemployment and idle productive enterprises that have been decimated by the lack of market demand. In Greece, one of the countries left behind by productivity increases elsewhere, economic stimulation through monetary policy (currency devaluation) has been precluded by the existence of the European monetary union, while the fiscal package demanded by the Continent’s leaders is severely anti-growth. Economic output in the euro zone continued to decline in the fourth quarter of last year, and the outlook has been so grim that a recent report finding zero growth in the first quarter of this year was widely greeted as good news.

There is, in fact, plenty of historical evidence that the most effective way to cut deficits is to combine deficit reduction with rapid economic growth, which generates more revenue. The huge deficits after World War II largely disappeared with fast economic growth, and something similar happened during Bill Clinton’s presidency. The much praised reduction of the Swedish budget deficit from 1994 to 1998 occurred alongside fairly rapid growth. In contrast, European countries today are being asked to cut their deficits while remaining trapped in zero or negative economic growth.

There are surely lessons here from John Maynard Keynes, who understood that the state and the market are interdependent. But Keynes had little to say about social justice, including the political commitments with which Europe emerged after World War II. These led to the birth of the modern welfare state and national health services — not to support a market economy but to protect human well-being.

Though these social issues did not engage Keynes deeply, there is an old tradition in economics of combining efficient markets with the provision of public services that the market may not be able to deliver. As Adam Smith (often seen simplistically as the first guru of free-market economics) wrote in “The Wealth of Nations,” there are “two distinct objects” of an economy: “first, to provide a plentiful revenue or subsistence for the people, or, more properly, to enable them to provide such a revenue or subsistence for themselves; and secondly, to supply the state or commonwealth with a revenue sufficient for the public services.”

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of Europe’s current malaise is the replacement of democratic commitments by financial dictates — from leaders of the European Union and the European Central Bank, and indirectly from credit-rating agencies, whose judgments have been notoriously unsound. 

 

Participatory public discussion — the “government by discussion” expounded by democratic theorists like John Stuart Mill and Walter Bagehot — could have identified appropriate reforms over a reasonable span of time, without threatening the foundations of Europe’s system of social justice. In contrast, drastic cuts in public services with very little general discussion of their necessity, efficacy or balance have been revolting to a large section of the European population and have played into the hands of extremists on both ends of the political spectrum.

Europe cannot revive itself without addressing two areas of political legitimacy. First, Europe cannot hand itself over to the unilateral views — or good intentions — of experts without public reasoning and informed consent of its citizens. Given the transparent disdain for the public, it is no surprise that in election after election the public has shown its dissatisfaction by voting out incumbents.

Second, both democracy and the chance of creating good policy are undermined when ineffective and blatantly unjust policies are dictated by leaders. The obvious failure of the austerity mandates imposed so far has undermined not only public participation — a value in itself — but also the possibility of arriving at a sensible, and sensibly timed, solution.

This is a surely a far cry from the “united democratic Europe” that the pioneers of European unity sought.

Amartya Sen, a Nobel laureate and a professor of economics and philosophy at Harvard, is the author, most recently, of “The Idea of Justice.”

The Unfairness of the Switch Hit

Why aren't more bowlers complaining about the switch hit?

The stroke is patently unfair and widens the imbalance between bat and ball

Ian Chappell

May 20, 2012

In my playing days I believed many Englishmen used to unnecessarily complicate what was meant to be a reasonably simple game. It looks like that habit has now spread. 

I can't imagine a more complicated solution to control the switch-hit phenomenon than what the ICC is considering. Complex changes to the lbw law regarding what is a batsman's leg side and analysis of the risk-reward ratio of the shot to see if it disadvantages the bowler are two such proposals. Without watching another ball bowled, I can tell you the answer to the second suggestion: the switch hit is patently unfair to bowlers.

If a bowler, having already told the batsman (via the umpire) how he's going to propel the ball, places his field for a right-hander and ends up delivering to a left-hander, how can that be fair? It's possible to reach a more equitable arrangement dealing with the mafia.

One of the critical duties of an administrator is to ensure the contest between bat and ball remains balanced, like an evenly weighted see-saw. The switch hit is a hefty dad on one end with his five-year-old son, feet dangling in mid-air, on the other.

A simple law that states, "Having taken up his stance, a batsman may not change the order of his feet or hands in playing a shot", would ensure balance is restored.

With the fielding positions still effective, let the batsman play the reverse sweep, the scoop or whatever other innovative premeditated shot he dreams up and any self-respecting bowler will feel the odds are in his favour. The reverse sweep does not defy the proposed law above because the top and bottom hands remain exactly that on the handle.

If the ICC wants real proof of any disadvantage then let the bowler not have to tell the batsman from which side of the wicket he's going to deliver. When the bowler swaps from over to round at his pleasure, see how long it is before batsmen are bleating. In fact, the umpires would probably be the first to call for a truce.

In addition to disadvantaging the bowlers, the switch hit could unfairly help the batting side win a tight Test match. By swapping at the last moment, a batsman could induce a no-ball under the maximum-two-fieldsmen behind-square-leg law to gain victory without hitting the ball or the bowler knowingly doing anything illegal.

	One of the critical duties of an administrator is to ensure the contest between bat and ball remains balanced, like an evenly weighted see-saw. The switch hit is a hefty dad on one end with his five year-old son, feet dangling in mid-air, on the other

I've championed the cause of bowlers over the years, as the major innovators in the game, and I'm staggered they have been so timid in this debate. Whatever happened to the spirit of those revolutionaries John Willes and Ned Willsher, both of whom played a role during the 19th century in upgrading bowling from underarm (via sidearm) to the modern over-arm delivery?

I'm surprised no modern-day bowling revolutionary has tried swapping alternate deliveries from over and round the wicket until the officials enquired, "What's your problem?"

As a part-time leggie and a baseball catcher in my younger days, I would have seriously considered letting a batsman have it with a well-directed throw if he changed the order of his hands or feet while I was running in to bowl. I've no doubt Wills and Willsher would adopt more subtle methods, but I'm sure they would have admired my zeal in attempting to get my point across.

I'm often told the switch hit should be allowed because it's legal in baseball. That's nonsensical because in baseball the hitter has to stand in either the left- or right-hand batter's box, so the pitcher knows beforehand what he's facing and can adjust his field accordingly. And late in a close game the opposing manager will call on either a right- or left-handed pitcher in order to exploit the switch hitter's weaker side.

There's no doubt the switch hit requires a hell of a lot of skill, and it's exciting when Kevin Pietersen or David Warner clubs a six while quickly swapping from one style of batsman to another. Skilful yes, fair on the bowlers no, and it's the approval of such imbalances between bat and ball that can lead to things like chucking and ball-tampering, or at the very least on-field animosity.

On Migraines: they are all in the head

They start with a spinning black penny, retch-inducing smells, impaired thought and speech. But migraines bring odd pleasures with their pain

• 
• • Eva Wiseman
  • The Observer, Sunday 20 May 2012

Dark days: when it hits, a migraine is like a film melting in your projector. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

 

The first time it happened I was in bed with a book, aged maybe 10. And I remember going over the same line again and again, with rising levels of panic, as I realised I had forgotten how to read. I didn't think it was something you could just forget. Something that, having picked up, you could then one day drop again. I see now it was my first migraine.

Today migraines are in the news and they're in my head, tightening around my crown like an alice band. The NHS is considering offering Botox to patients with chronic migraines. They don't know quite how it helps, but they've decided it does. The blocking of muscle contraction, which is what the botulinum toxin does to those stunning their wrinkles, hasn't been proved to relieve headaches, but two clinical trials did conclude that it led to a 10% reduction in the number of patients' headachey days. In addition, I imagine, to a laboratory paved with clingfilmed foreheads.

I'm writing now through day four of this month's headache, one that began (as do many) with a flickering blind spot in the centre of my vision. It starts small, a spinning black penny in the middle of a page. I slump in my seat as it spreads darkly over my sight like jam, and I can't see, or think, or entirely understand speech. It's the film melting in my projector – it's a bit like falling. Smells slay me. Noise, fine, but smells – Angel perfume in a lift, for instance, or that dirty spitting rain you get in cities, the kind that smells of apocalypse – will make me retch. And minutes later the headache comes.

The author Siri Hustvedt wrote about a migraine aura phenomenon called Alice in Wonderland syndrome – the migraineur feels parts of their body ballooning or shrinking. For me it's often my hand. I'll lie in bed and under my cheek it'll swell to the size of a football, or a room, or shrink until it's dust. These episodes when my reality wobbles are not entirely unpleasant.

I half-enjoy the days preceding a migraine when everything feels like déjà vu. When walking home, a series of sights – a smoking schoolgirl, a chained-up bike – are overwhelming in their impact. Everything I see reminds me of something else, but something just out of reach. It reminds me that it's reminding me, but not what it's reminding me of. In its un-graspableness, this feeling is similar to one of the factors that brings these migraines on – the reflections from the Regent's Canal that play on the ceiling above my desk. Ripples of light lead to ripples in my reality, this warm tightness behind my eyes, a grim ache in my jaw.

The pain is sometimes awful, but more often it's medicated and so simply… saddening. I take these lovely painkillers, so it's rare I'll feel the blinding sharpness. Rather than being slammed into a wall, it feels as if my head is stuck in a closing door. It's the dull agony of a deadline looming, of a nagging phobia, of going up in a lift as your vertigo builds. But I miss stuff. Parties, dinners, often meanings – I'll be interviewing somebody in a brightly lit room and will find myself two thoughts behind, my eyes scrunched in concentration, praising Olympus for the reliability of its dictaphones.

I realise, though, that it's these vibrations on the drum skin of my life that make me me. I see the world through a smoky, migrainous filter. And like somebody teetering on the edge of a depressive episode, not yet fallen, I'm able to stand outside it and look around, curiously. Medicating with Botox seems like an apt metaphor – in ironing out the migraineur's wrinkles, the doctor smooths their reality. No more hands the size of houses. No more fainting as an effect of sunlight spearing through dark trees. So I've learned to embrace this gentle madness. In succumbing to a migraine, I get to test what's real.

It will be Smarter to learn from the Germans

Easy to blame the Germans. Smarter to learn from them

Other leaders are being hypocritical when they shove all the responsibility for the euro crisis on to Angela Merkel

• 
• • Andrew Rawnsley
  • The Observer, Sunday 20 May 2012

Chancellor Angela Merkel with David Cameron. Photograph: Michel Euler/AP

 

As Noël Coward didn't quite sing, do let's be beastly to the Germans. This bitter tune is heard not just in Greece, but also in the corridors of Number 10, the Elysée Palace and the White House. Casting around for someone to blame for the crisis, the fingers of accusation point at Germany and its chancellor, Angela Merkel.

The jabbing fingers are furiously angry ones on the streets of Athens where German flags are burnt and the newspapers dress Ms Merkel in Nazi uniform. The jabbing continues in editorials in the American press, which charges Berlin with being single-handedly responsible for taking the world economy to the brink of the abyss. The jabbing is dressed in the language of diplomacy at this weekend's G8 summit where Barack Obama, François Hollande and David Cameron have ganged up on the German chancellor.

The American Democrat, British Conservative and French Socialist may not agree on much else, but on this, at least, they are together. It is one second to midnight in the eurozone because a recalcitrant and miserly Germany has refused to step up to its historic responsibility to do what is necessary to save the single currency. If the eurozone implodes, and carries away the global economy with it, the buck will stop in Berlin.

Let us begin by acknowledging that Germany does deserve a big helping of blame for the very scary state of the eurozone. Berlin shares, principally with Paris, responsibility for the original sin. That was to construct a badly designed and over-stretched single currency area containing contradictions that would explode under stress. In the pursuit of a European ideal, Germany forgot its usual prudence when Berlin nodded and winked at the admission of countries – Greece being the most extreme example – for whom euro membership was not only inappropriate but very dangerous.

It is fair enough also to observe that Germany has repeatedly failed to offer leadership that rises to the scale of the present crisis. When Germany has led, it has not always been in a well-judged direction. The austerity programme imposed on the Greeks as the price for continued membership of the euro was too draconian to be implemented in a democracy. The voters would surely revolt and they duly have.

The European Central Bank has been denied the necessary firepower to get ahead of events because the Germans wouldn't allow it. Ms Merkel has never been a very easy partner for her peer group. One of Gordon Brown's officials who had a ringside seat during the negotiations at the London G20 describes her thus: "Incredibly stubborn. Immovable. She simply digs in." One of David Cameron's team says dealing with the German chancellor is "like trying to squeeze blood from the proverbial stone".

I expect she will concede just enough to the growth agenda being pushed by other G8 leaders for them to cobble together an end-of-summit communiqué that pretends they are all agreed. There will be a further attempt to reconcile the German insistence on fiscal discipline with the French call for measures to promote growth when the EU heads of government meet in Brussels on Wednesday. One proposal would see the European Investment Bank receive an additional €10bn in funding. The leaders are also likely to back a European Commission plan to issue "project bonds" – debt backed by all 17 eurozone countries to raise funds for infrastructure programmes in depressed regions. All of which will give them something to justify meeting and none of which is anything like sufficient to ease an immediate crisis of such magnitude that €10bn is peanuts.

Germany must take her portion of the blame for the calamities in the eurozone and the cataclysm that now threatens to unfold. But the more I hear people being beastly about the Germans, the more I see all the responsibility being shoved in their direction, the more my sympathies begin to lean towards Angela Merkel's dilemmas and her people's concerns. When Barack Obama calls for "decisive action" to save the eurozone, Germans hear him saying that they should write yet more large cheques to bail it out. When François Hollande demands a growth package, Germans ask who but they will pay for it when everyone else in Europe is broke. When David Cameron tells the eurozone to "put its house in order", Germans perceive a peremptory request for them to throw more good money after bad. Germany will probably end up picking up most of the bill for this disaster, but you can see why they are tired of being told to do so.

The demand has to be particularly galling when it comes from David Cameron, the prime minister of a country that is not a member of the euro and who leads a party that wills it to fail. Angela Merkel is entitled to feel that being told to relax on fiscal discipline is particularly cheeky – a kinder word than hypocritical – coming from Mr Cameron. In speeches to home audiences, the prime minister insists that he must defy "dangerous voices calling on us to retreat" and stick with his government's austerity programme on the grounds that: "You can't borrow your way out of a debt crisis." Yet when lecturing the Germans, Mr Cameron recommends that they should turn on the spending taps to get the eurozone out of its debt crisis.

His aides say that the prime minister wants to make common cause with Monsieur Hollande in pressing Chancellor Merkel for a more growth-orientated strategy in Europe. That would be the same Monsieur Hollande whom the prime minister would not deign to meet before he was elected to the Elysée, the same Monsieur Hollande who was badmouthed by Tories as a crazy leftie who would lead his country to ruin – Ed Balls in a beret.

The reason why Germany has found herself in this isolated position boils down to this: she has money and everyone else does not. Her economy is growing, her unemployment rate is much lower and her debts are under control. She is a rich country among paupers because Germany has been much better governed than her peer group. Some reckless German financiers laid stupid bets, but her banks were not allowed to hazard the rest of the economy in quite such a shocking way as banks were in Britain and America.

Germany took care of her finances much more prudently than her European neighbours. She has a welfare state, public services and infrastructure that provoke jealousy in any visitor from Britain. But she did not make the mistake of trying to buy them on the never-never. Germany did not build up the mountains of debt, both private and public, which bear down on Britain and others. As a result, German households and firms can borrow without being punished by the bond market vigilantes.

It is true that the Germans have had a fantastic deal out of the euro; a much better one than either they or anyone else anticipated when they thought they were sacrificing their beloved deutchsmark in the cause of European unity. The theory at the time was that the euro would help the less impressive economies to catch up and create, in Helmut Kohl's phrase, "a strong Germany in a strong Europe".

The actual result has turned out to be a strong Germany in a weak Europe. The euro has certainly boosted their exports-driven economy, which is one reason why Germans should be very fearful of its implosion. But it was not the euro that made them a great exporting nation in the first place. They were extremely accomplished at selling things when they were priced in the powerful deutchsmark because postwar Germany has been brilliant at manufacturing goods that others want to buy.

It was announced last week that Vauxhall will be building its new model of Astra at Ellesmere Port in Cheshire rather than in a German factory. This news was regarded as so remarkable that two cabinet ministers were sent north to mark it. While Vince Cable paid a celebratory visit to the plant, David Cameron made a speech in Manchester applauding a renaissance in the car industry. It is very good news for British manufacturing – so long as you don't linger too long over the caveat that Vauxhall is owned by General Motors of America. But such a fuss over one announcement draws attention to the rarity of Britain beating Germany at car-making since 1945.

The usual mode of British politicians is to be envious of what Germany has achieved. Ed Miliband commends the German model of industrial relations, in which workers are represented on company boards, as a restraint on the corporate excesses we have seen in Britain. With its record of investment in high-value industries and emphasis on making quality goods that the world wants to own, German strength is based on the solid prosperity that coalition ministers aspire to create when they talk about "rebalancing" the British economy.

Germany has its flaws. Angela Merkel has made her fair share of mistakes. But this is no time for contempt, especially not from Britain, for a country that is enviably competitive, rich, stable, free and socially and environmentally progressive. If there is a long-term solution to the miseries of the rest of Europe, it doesn't lie in being beastly to the Germans. It would be a better idea to try to learn from them.

England's Strategy for Success

All for One, One for All

Simon Hughes in Cricinfo

It was in 1997 that the chairman of the ECB, Lord MacLaurin, declared England would be the best team in the world within a decade. His aspiration was ridiculed at the time - and two years later England sank to the bottom of the unofficial Wisden world rankings. In 2011, with the 4-0 win over India, they finally realised their ambition. Four years late, perhaps, but no one was counting - even if the calculators were out again in 2012 when they lost 3-0 to Pakistan. 

There were many reasons for their elevation, not least the decline of other, once distinguished, sides. But to cite that alone would be to belittle England's feat, which was the result of considerable talent, careful planning and total dedication. To attain sporting predominance, it was ever thus.

Central contracts, introduced during Duncan Fletcher's regime, in 2000, were a major factor. They gave the players a sense of belonging at international level, empowered the coaches to work closely with their charges and, vitally, gave them time. England now have a backroom staff who at times outnumber the players. While this arouses some scepticism in the media, especially among the in-my-day fraternity, there is no doubting their worth as England transformed the art of cricket into something more scientific. In that spirit, here is a suitably ordered analysis of their route to the top.

 

1. The right stuff
 

It all began when Andrew Strauss and Andy Flower, two determined and ambitious men, joined forces in early 2009. Their first step was to identify players with the right character, and sift out anyone not completely in tune with the team's goals. Chief among these were Andrew Flintoff - emblematic as ever as he approached the end of his career, but a law unto himself - and his faintly lethargic sidekick Steve Harmison. Flower recognised the team was sprinkled with what he regarded as individual plcs and saw the importance of selling them off. He and Strauss developed a slogan, "The team is not a hire car", which encouraged the players to treat it with care and respect, rather than take advantage of it like a hatchback leased from Avis. They introduced a new level of commitment, consideration and honesty, and everyone bought into the ethos. Now, there was genuine delight at each other's successes.

 

2. Cover all bases
 

Keen to draw on ideas from other sports, Flower went to The Oval soon after taking over to watch a game of American football, strangely enough. He was struck not only by the number of coaches employed by the NFL's Green Bay Packers, but by the meticulous organisation of the pre-match training. As a result, England rehearse their roles with all manner of accessories. There are bright orange ramps off which close catches are skimmed; extra-thin bats for slicing slip catches; rubber clubs for whacking balls into orbit; springy stumps or mini-goals to shy at; and small square frames of elasticated mesh off which the ball ricochets to replicate bat-pad catches. Every possible fielding scenario is visualised and practised with total concentration. Unsurprisingly, England's out-cricket has been consistently better than anyone else's, while Jimmy Anderson - who among other key positions now stands at slip to Graeme Swann - is possibly the best all-round fielder England have ever had.

 

3. Wot no football?
 

Warm-ups with a kickabout had become an incongruous cliche´: in no other sport do players prepare by playing, well, another sport. Since the arrival as fitness coach of Welshman Huw Bevan, the former conditioning coach of the Ospreys rugby union team, England's training has been more rigorous, while the drills fit the disciplines. Fast bowlers are taken through a succession of 24 short sprints to replicate a four-over spell. Batsmen bat overs and are ordered to run the occasional three during an enervating net. Fielders are carefully filmed to pinpoint their biomechanical strengths and weaknesses. Data relating to successful catches, diving stops and run-outs is also collated by assistant coach Richard Halsall.

With an incessant schedule and frequent back-to-back Tests, stamina is vital. By keeping training varied, Bevan has raised fitness standards to almost Olympic levels. One of Flower's favourite moments of the 2010-11 Ashes win came when Jonathan Trott, after batting more than eight hours for an undefeated 168 in Melbourne, still had the energy, alertness and agility to swoop low at extra cover and run out Phil Hughes early in Australia's reply. The practice - amusing to some - of running over to a team-mate to congratulate him after a good stop not only induces a feeling of claustrophobia in the batsman but wards off lethargy in the field.

 

4. The whole world in one place
 

For some time England have led the field in cricket gadgets. Following on from Merlyn, an ingenious piece of engineering that can propel any kind of spin to precise specification, was ProBatter, a souped-up bowling machine that had the approach and delivery of opposing bowlers projected, film-like, on to its front to face the batsman. Using Hawk-Eye data, it can even reproduce actual overs from Tests.

This is as close as it gets to cricketing time travel: if you didn't handle a spell very well first time round, now is your chance to make amends. In effect, ProBatter transports the international game's bowling brethren to the nets at the ECB Academy in Loughborough. There is also a device that measures the amount of revolutions imparted by a spinner; unsurprisingly, Swann scores highly.

 

5. Pinpoint accuracy
 

England collect a wealth of data on their opponents. For any opposing batsman, the pitch is divided into coloured squares, with a statistic in each one revealing how the batsman fares when the ball lands there. In some cases, it confirms what everyone already knew: Mike Hussey, for example, is brutal against anything short and wide. But it also offers the bowlers clues about a batsman's weaknesses: in 2011, it proved a major aid in combating Sachin Tendulkar, as England plugged away outside off in the knowledge this was the best means of keeping him quiet.

Most significantly, England had the bowlers to put these plans into action. Anderson, in particular, can land the ball in the same spot time after time, though he is also extraordinarily versatile. Two deliveries from the recent past stand out: the ball to dismiss the left-handed Hussey for eight in Melbourne, tantalisingly pitched a fraction outside off stump, just short of a half-volley, inviting the drive, then nipping away a fraction to take the edge; and a near mirror-image to the right-handed Virender Sehwag in the second innings at Edgbaston. The plan had been to bowl straight as a die, but Stuart Broad said in the dressing-room beforehand: "I've just had a vision: Sehwag caught Strauss bowled Anderson zero." Anderson decided to offer the Indian opener, on a pair, the carrot of a driveable ball. Just as Broad had predicted, Sehwag had a swish and sliced it to Strauss at first slip to depart for a king pair. Despite their superb discipline, then, the bowlers were never dissuaded from going with their hunches.

 

6. Cherish the ball
 

The potency of a new ball is taken as read, and England generally make excellent use of it. With the help of bowling coach David Saker they focused on the periods when a ball is older and less effective, and worked on different strategies. Led by Anderson, they developed the wobble-seam delivery for use when the ball has lost its initial shine - after about 20 overs - but still has a proud seam. Released with the seam slightly canted, rather than bolt upright, the ball lands on the edge of the seam, then moves unpredictably. With meticulous care, they were also able to find reverse-swing earlier, sometimes by the 12th over. The key is to keep the ball scrupulously dry, so it is kept off the grass, or bounced on bare, rough parts of the square, and religiously passed back to the bowler via the sweat-free Alastair Cook.

 

7. Don't change gear
 

If bowlers are Test-match finishers, then batsmen do the spadework. But until recently England have rarely run up mammoth totals. Watching the way prolific subcontinental batsmen such as Mahela Jayawardene and Rahul Dravid assembled their scores, they realised the secret was to keep playing the same way throughout an innings, rather than seek to go through the gears and finally dominate the bowlers. Players such as Cook and Trott abided by this philosophy, picking up their runs quietly, unobtrusively, incessantly. They never sought to score in unfamiliar areas, sticking instead to their own risk-free plans. Cook's extraordinary propensity to avoid sweating - his sole pair of batting gloves were still bone dry after his marathon 294 against India at Edgbaston - has certainly helped.

Graham Gooch - England's leading run-scorer and now the batting coach - has been a major influence in this regard. He focused the players' minds with simple sayings like "play straight - be great", and encouraged them to convert "daddy" hundreds (150-plus) into "grand-daddies" (200-plus). He has also been unstinting in his support, whether feeding them thousands of balls with his ingenious Sidearm thrower, or hardening their mental approach. The result was six individual double-centuries in 12 Tests and seven team totals of over 500.

 

8. The end of the tail-end
 

One statistic put the England-India series into perspective: England's last five wickets averaged 57 runs each; India's 20. This was no accident, for the England lower order spend almost as much time in the nets as the main batsmen. Importantly, though, there is no pressure applied to them from the top and middle order: each lower-order batsman ("tailender" now feels obsolete) is encouraged to be positive and do what comes naturally, as long as it is not reckless and takes into consideration both the batting partner and the match situation.

 

9. Doing the maths
 

Flower was profoundly influenced by Moneyball, Michael Lewis's fascinating account of how the Oakland Athletics baseball team used statistics and computer analysis to improve their results. The recruitment of Nathan Leamon - cricket coach, maths boffin, and known in the team as "Numbers" - has been significant. On a daily basis, he enters individual, team, ground and other historical data into the Monte Carlo simulator, a specially designed computer program which forecasts the probability of various eventualities. These projections form the basis of England's decision-making - from team selection and what to do at the toss, to declarations, field settings and bowling strategies. Leamon played the Melbourne Test of 2010-11 through his simulator thousands of times in advance, concluding that England were 15-20% more likely to win if they bowled first. The statistics not only convinced England, but also invigorated them after their defeat at Perth: on Boxing Day, at the spiritual home of Australian sport, they put the home side in and promptly skittled them for 98. Three days later, the Ashes had been retained.

 

10. A constant quest
 

As a player, Flower had a restless desire for self-improvement. As a coach, he has imbued that urge in his team, though he admitted he fell short of his own high standards before the series against Pakistan in the UAE; if that was untypical, his honesty was not. Flower says he tries to make each individual keen to discover how good they can possibly be, which is why he and the coaching staff offer the players regular challenges to better themselves. The squad met at Cardiff Castle at the beginning of last summer to discuss how they could continue to progress. All the bowlers and three batsmen - Cook, Trott and Pietersen - were regarded as having attained world-class status after the Ashes, but others were lagging behind. By the end of last summer, during which the bowlers continued to reign supreme, England had four batsmen (now including Ian Bell) in the world top 10, two genuine allrounders (Broad and Tim Bresnan), plus Matt Prior, who had the best batting average of any England wicketkeeper. In short, they had no weak link. In the end, it was hardly surprising they crushed India.

Between the nadir of 51 all out in Jamaica in February 2009 and the end of 2011, England played 34 completed Tests, won 20 and lost only four. When asked to pinpoint one underlying reason for their success, Strauss said simply: "A team working together." While this may sound tautological, in high-level sport it is notoriously hard to achieve. Just ask Martin Johnson or Fabio Capello.

VISUALISATION

Wayne Rooney reveals visualisation forms important part of preparation

• Manchester United striker: 'I visualise scoring wonder goals'
• Says Finland forward Jari Litmanen was an inspiration

• Jamie Jackson
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 17 May 2012 15.30 BST

Wayne Rooney say he lies in bed 'the night before the game and visualise myself scoring goals or doing well'. Photograph: Michael Regan/Getty Images

 

Wayne Rooney has revealed how since being a very young player he visualises game patterns and goalscoring situations to enhance his performance.

The Manchester United and England striker told ESPN: "Part of my preparation is I go and ask the kit man what colour we're wearing – if it's red top, white shorts, white socks or black socks. Then I lie in bed the night before the game and visualise myself scoring goals or doing well. You're trying to put yourself in that moment and trying to prepare yourself, to have a 'memory' before the game. I don't know if you'd call it visualising or dreaming, but I've always done it, my whole life.

"When I was younger, I used to visualise myself scoring wonder goals, stuff like that. From 30 yards out, dribbling through teams. You used to visualise yourself doing all that, and when you're playing professionally, you realise it's important for your preparation."

Asked about his abilities as a developing player with regard to his peers Rooney added: "You're a bit more advanced than the kids your age, so there are times on the pitch where you can see different things, but they can't obviously see it. So then you get annoyed – they can't calculate.

"It's like when you play snooker, you're always thinking three or four shots down the line. With football, it's like that. You've got to think three or four passes where the ball is going to come to down the line. And the very best footballers, they're able to see that before – much quicker than a lot of other footballers."

Jari Litmanen, the former Ajax and Liverpool No10, provided one source of inspiration for Rooney. "I enjoyed how he moved and got into space," he said. "And he was patient. If you looked at him, he always never looked like he was rushed doing anything. He always used to take his time. Then, when the opportunity came, he found the space to get the ball in the net.

"The more you do it, the more it works. You need to know where everyone is on the pitch. You need to see everything."