When England teams go on tour nowadays, they are accompanied by physiotherapists, psychotherapists, management theorists and every kind of ancilliary authority except the most essential: a music consultant. Anyone with perfect pitch - which you should be aware is not a batsman's dream strip, but an ability to recognise a note by ear - would warn them that the music that booms through their tinny little headsets is destroying what passes for their cricketing brains.
A generation ago, the England captain Mike Brearley survived the fearsome wrath of Lillee and Thomson by determinedly humming to himself, over and over again, the opening bars of Beethoven's Razumovsky Quartet, opus 59 number one if I remember rightly.
Brearley, a better motivator than he was strokemaker, was aware that classical music was naturally suited to Test cricket, consisting as it does of long stretches of uneventful play, interspersed with bursts of frenzy and building at its noblest to a climax of unbearable tension. By filling his mind with classical music, Brearley was able to hone his concentration, sublimate his fear and lead England to an Ashes victory.
Nor was Brearley a lone aesthete in a louts' eleven. Bob Willis, the strike bowler, was a Wagner man who ran in with Ride of the Valkyries throbbing in his cranium. David Gower, master of the late cut, has latterly become a supporter of one of the London chamber orchestras. The sound that gave these cultured players the strength to beat the world was not the crackly speeches of Winston Churchill, as prescribed by the present England coach, nor the drivellish Zombie favoured by Nasser Hussain or Swamp Thing (Graham Thorpe).
What England need, before they meet Australia next summer, is a short, sharp course in a higher class of music. Something that will do for their will to win what Puccini's ``Vincero, vincero!'' did for Italia 90. Mahler's Resurrection Symphony should set the mood in the dressing room, followed by Beethoven's ode to Wellington's Victory and one or other of Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance marches. ``Hail the Conqu'ring Hero Comes'' from Handel's Judas Maccabaeus would not come amiss. Avoid, under all circumstances, Bernstein's Age of Anxiety symphony. Also Tchaikovsky's Pathtique.
After that, it becomes more specialised. The opening pair could take a tip from Brearley and pick a classic string quartet which, with its inner voices, immutable structure and inherent tensions, is designed to stimulate introspective concentration. If they can't abide Beethoven, the opening of Schubert's Death and the Maiden is equally applicable. No hidden analogy, although a nonwicket maiden to an opening bat is no small psychological victory.
Once the going gets easier, numbers three and four should hum the propulsive cello theme from Verdi's Force of Destiny overture. If nothing else, it'll put the Aussie slips off their sledging. For personal variation, John Crawley might whistle the swaggering leitmotiv of Krenek's 1927 opera Johnny Strikes Up.
As far as the bowlers are concerned, rhythm is all - and the simplest rhythms are to be found in masterpieces of minimalism like Ravel's Bolro and Steve Reich's Drumming. The quicks should think of Jupiter, hurler of thunderbolts, from Holst's suite The Planets; the spinners could profitably variegate Elgar's Enigma.
Which leaves the vexed question of what to advise the captain. Michael Atherton should, in my view, think orchestral. He must stop seeing himself as one of the lads, a rank-and-file player, and start acting like a conductor who controls the elements of play by means of a natural authority. He needs to listen to the opening of a flawless masterpiece - Beethoven's Eroica, Bruckner's Seventh - and imagine himself structuring the day's play from the very first over, the way a great conductor imposes his ideas from the opening downbeat.
At the same time, he needs to be flexible enough to cope both with human error and divine inspiration, changing his conception of play on a whim. He should spend a term at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester. Ideally, he should attend a St Petersburg masterclass of the grand Russian maestro-master, Ilya Musin. Batting and baton practice have much in common. Like Atherton, most maestros suffer from sore backs.
It's not too late for the captain to refine his tastes. But unless he and the team get comprehensively retuned before the Aussies turn up, the only classics they'll be hearing this summer are Haydn's Farewell Symphony and Gorecki's recent elegy, Good Night.