Barry Richards, Angus Fraser, Graeme Fowler and Peter Roebuck ponder the way forward for Stewart's team

Scyld Berry: How do we see the series going, with England 1-0 down and two Tests to come?

Barry Richards: South Africa should win it. If England are going to come back at all, a lot depends on whether Ian Salisbury can come out of left field and do something remarkable. The South Africans don't play a really good leg-spinner well, but they'll murder one who is not out of the top drawer.

Angus Fraser: They've got the ascendancy and we've got to grab it back. We had it in the first Test and at 46 for four in the second.

Peter Roebuck: England need a solid opening pair.

SB: An appalling fact is that England have reached 200 in their first innings only five times in their last 14 Tests.

AF: Yes, we've kept losing a couple of early wickets and been on the back foot thereafter.

Graeme Fowler: I think we knock ourselves too often. Everyone knows we've got the ability to knock the South Africans over and win the next game, but we've also got the ability to be less than mediocre. So what needs to happen is for that bottom end of performance to be removed. Why, for example, did we play two hook shots on the last day at Old Trafford when we didn't need to? We are crap at recognising what is a good ball and what isn't because of so much one-day cricket.

PR: Isn't it true that we can only succeed as a team? Other countries have some major individual who can turn a match for them.

AF: We have three bowlers averaging just under 30 with the ball who could be called match-winners. The trouble at Old Trafford was that the pitch negated them because it didn't swing or seam. Allan Donald was head and shoulders above everyone else, magnificent, as good a display of fast bowling as I've seen for years. Just give us something to bowl on. We get these print-outs after each game, showing how many short balls we've bowled, or how many outside leg stump; well, afterwards I showed Athers three sets of my stats, for the Trinidad Tests and Old Trafford, and asked him which was the best, and he said Old Trafford. But we need a bit of something in the pitch.

SB: In the Daily Telegraph, Barry, you have criticised the body language of the England team.

BR: When the South Africans do their warm-ups, they seem to be a pace quicker than England in whatever they do. They still want to be No 1, and they haven't achieved it yet because they didn't beat Australia last winter.

PR: South Africa lack a great batsman. That's why they are still vulnerable.

SB: What else about England's body language?

BR: Little things. When Allan Donald gives them a stare, Mike Atherton and Alec Stewart will give him a steely look at given times, but most of the other England batsmen look away.

SB: Suppose you were appointed England's coach for the rest of this series?

BR: Nothing can be done in the short term. ``It took me 20 years to be an overnight success,'' as Peter Sellers once said.

PR: There are no solutions, only improvements.

BR: I went to the Hampshire nets this week as my son is playing a few second XI games for them. I asked him if he had been sledged, and he said yes, but nothing like Australia where he has grown up. I'm not saying sledging is everything, but a word here and there is part of playing the game intensely, and to me 'intensity' sums it up. You have to raise the levels of intensity in English cricket until everyone becomes used to it.

SB: Nasser Hussain said that only once last season did he come across county bowling that had anything like the intensity of Test bowling when Donald and Dougie Brown were charging in on a result wicket for Warwickshire. How often did that happen when you played domestic cricket in South Africa?

BR: Natal versus Transvaal was just like a Test match because of the circumstances of the era. But you can't compare. I'm sure it's very difficult for the England players to go back to their counties between Tests and play intensely in game after game. Ian Healy only plays a couple of games a year for Queensland, but when he does, it's as if he's playing for Australia.

GF: I think county cricket was a better preparation for Test cricket in the 1980s when there were two overseas players per county. Hampshire meant Gordon Greenidge and Malcolm Marshall. Against Somerset I remember scoring eight not out, and it was like a Test innings. Ian Botham was trying, and Lancashire had told Joel Garner he was too tall to be a fast bowler, so he was steaming in.

PR: What have Waqar and Wasim and Mushtaq done this season for their counties?

SB: They seem to be so over-extended by the treadmill that they are performing for their counties like England players often do. How is this softness or lack of intensity in our cricket going to be cured?

GF: You go into county cricket to get a job and survive. County seconds is awful cricket. There's no urgency to get out of it. Nobody says, what have I got to do to get to the top? If you want to go to bed early to be at your best next day, there's this peer group pressure to go out for a drink.

PR: We have a surviving attitude, not a striving attitude. Brian Close always said the thing which most stops people succeeding in cricket is a lazy mind.

AF: There's a delicate balance. When I started at Middlesex young players were given little. Now they're given everything they could wish for but they certainly don't appear as hungry as Mike Gatting still is, or Justin Langer.

PR: Yet I believe there's as much talent in English cricket as anywhere except perhaps Pakistan.

AF: I've come across two really good young batters this season, Stephen Peters of Essex and Michael Powell at Glamorgan.

SB: In the shorter term, what is going to happen in the Ashes series this winter?

BR: England are going to struggle. Put it this way, I can't see anyone except Darren Gough getting into the Australian side, and even he wouldn't be certain if all the Australian bowlers were fit.

PR: I expect Langer will take over from Greg Blewett at No 3. Shane Warne is struggling with his shoulder and can't bowl his flipper or his big leg-spinner, and everyone reads his googly. But he was 'struggling' last winter and still took 35 or 36 wickets in six Tests (general laughter).

SB: How can England's fielding be improved?

GF: It's the batsmen who don't bowl who dictate that. It's up to Nasser, Ramps, Thorpe and Athers to be the whippets and keep the side up, and I'd say humour is the best way to keep the intensity going.

AF: I know there's a lot of humour at Middlesex, but in the England dressing-room people are more sensitive, so you feel you have to be careful with what you say.

PR: When England are more successful they won't be so sensitive.

AF: At Lord's Athers and I jokingly were wondering if we should ask Dean Headley if his speedometer rating of 86mph was for the speed he was bowling or the speed the ball was coming off the bat, but we kept it to ourselves.

SB: And what of longer-term improvements, if not solutions?

PR: We have to start separating roles. We can't have the chairman of selectors managing the one-day side in Australia. Managers must manage.

GF: There's no solidity at the top of England's management structure. Where does the buck stop? You could say David Graveney, as the chairman of selectors, but he wasn't in the West Indies. I would like to see one guy in charge of the England team, although I hate the word 'supremo', and he would pick the team. He could then smell out the players not fully committed to the team.

BR: I would agree, but a whole range of administrative decisions must be taken before England are consistently successful again. You have to start thinking of changing the constitution of English cricket, like Queensland, who then went on to win the Sheffield Shield for the first time. The most important change was to scrap the old system of 21 representatives, one from each constituent body, and to elect a board of 10 directors, the best men available, even if three came from the same club.

I would have thought English cricket has to do the same by electing a board of the best people. But if the counties are so committed to their own set-up, England will throw up the odd good team from time to time, in spite of the system, and that's it.