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Nasser Hussain, the Essex captain, and Duncan Fletcher, the Zimbabwean-born Glamorgan coach, are set to be installed as England's captain and coach within the next fortnight in response to England's early exit from the World Cup.

On Tuesday the working party of the England Management Advisory Committee will interview the four candidates on their short-list: Fletcher, Jack Birkenshaw of Leicestershire, Dav Whatmore of Lancashire and Bob Woolmer, provided South Africa are not in Wednesday's World Cup semi-final. A fifth candidate, John Wright of Kent, was eliminated from consideration last week.

With his natural authority and perceptive analysis of the game, albeit below Test level, Fletcher remains the front-runner, as the ambivalence of Woolmer - the early favourite - becomes ever more apparent.

Hussain's appointment will not be confirmed until after Surrey's championship match starting at the Oval on Tuesday, when Stewart will be hoping that a substantial innings might persuade the selectors to change their mind. But even then a hundred may well be too late. It is by the slenderest thread that his captaincy hangs this weekend.

England's selectors had earlier decided to give Stewart two last chances to save himself, the first of them in Surrey's championship match against Leicestershire during the week.

They wanted to see some runs from him - his 88 against Sri Lanka in the World Cup stands as his only 50 since his match-winning century against Australia at Melbourne in the Boxing Day Test - as proof that his right hand no longer hampers his batting and that he still has the motivation to continue as England's captain.

However, Stewart pulled out of Surrey's game against Leicestershire after aggravating the long-standing injury in his right hand during fielding practice, while Hussain scored 141 against Derbyshire.

Stewart's two remaining innings against Lancashire will pit him against Muttiah Muralitharan, the off-spinner who had all the England batsmen in knots and bowled them to defeat in the Oval Test last summer: not the first bowler Stewart would have chosen for the purposes of neck-saving.

But even a big hundred for Surrey will most probably not save Stewart from paying the price for England's failure to qualify for the Super Six phase of the World Cup.

The official line will emphasise that it is ``a time for change'' and that Stewart is not a scapegoat. However, that in effect is what he will be since his demotion will save the necks of everybody else involved in England's failure to qualify.

It might be thought strange that Stewart should be dismissed as Test captain - the only England captain to have won a major Test series in the last 13 years - because of England's poor World Cup performance. He was not appointed until last April, after Mike Atherton's resignation, and well after England began their World Cup preparations by assembling batsmen who could not bowl an over of seam between them, all-rounders who could not contribute with bat or ball, and pace bowlers who could not play a substantial innings between them.

In the coming week, when Lord MacLaurin, chairman of the England and Wales Cricket Board, and chairman of selectors David Graveney interview Hussain and Mark Ramprakash (the only other candidate but a distant second), they are sure to decide that Hussain will make a shrewd captain and one more likely to make the hard, unpopular, decisions in the dressing-room which Stewart has been reluctant to take. He is the toughest cookie England have and if anyone is going to lead England to regain the Ashes at home in 2001 it will be Hussain. The question is simply one of timing.

For there is one anti-climax that could be almost as big as England being knocked out of the World Cup at the qualifying stage: that is England failing to defeat the defiant, hard-working but there-to-be-beaten New Zealand side by a handsome margin in the four-Test series this summer. And an England team of fresh faces are more likely, if only marginally, to start off on the wrong foot under a new and inexperienced captain.