England applied the icing as if they'd been taking lessons from Delia Smith. This was another cordon-bleu performance and England won't mind that they cooked it up in the motorway caff of world cricket (only Bangladesh serve up less-appetising fare than poor old Zimbabwe). England's biggest battle was the one quietly fought among themselves. They have three young allrounders who are probably competing for two places in the 2003 World Cup, and the Collingwood-Flintoff-Hollioake sideshow was more absorbing than the main drama.

Collingwood was the least impressive of the bowlers, but redeemed himself with a superb catch in the deep and another unruffled, classy innings. Hollioake bowled his most intelligent spell yet for England, mixing offcutters that took the pace off the ball with deliveries that bounced disconcertingly. And Flintoff did a great job at the end, where his extra pace comes in handy, and would have had three wickets had James Foster not dropped Gary Brent. At the moment, there's nothing between them: England must be tempted to squeeze in all three.

Just as encouragingly, the batsmen seem to have found the perfect team formula. Marcus Trescothick belts the hell out of the opening bowlers (Douglas Hondo received two lots of six of the best), Nick Knight (series average: 100) and Nasser Hussain break the back of the total -- their three partnerships in this series were worth 98, 112 and 87 -- and Paul Collingwood cleans up. Better teams might rumble the ruse, but at least everybody knows his role now and it's a long time since England's one-day side has batted with anything remotely resembling a game-plan. Now all they have to do is tell Trescothick to cut out that ugly slog-sweep, which cost England victory against Pakistan at Lord's in July and has cost Trescothick his wicket too many times over the past year.

Only Mark Ramprakash has failed to press his case convincingly, and it was an un-Fletcher-like oversight not to give Owais Shah the chance to add to his two-ball duck in the third match.

Zimbabwe -- with the exception of Grant Flower -- played like men who simply didn't expect to win. They reached 204 for 4, but when acceleration was required they accidentally stepped on the brake. This was partly down to some patient and disciplined bowling by England, and partly to some hair-brained shot-selection. No-one was more thoughtless than Dion Ebrahim, who tried to reverse-sweep a good-length ball outside off stump -- and paid the predictable price a split-second later. Grant Flower (three runs in his first three innings, 200 in his last two) must have felt like David Beckham did last Saturday, when he took on Greece singlehandedly.

Their bowling was even worse. Doug Hondo (3-0-31-0) is barely county 2nd XI standard, and the rest weren't much better. Zimbabwe have now lost their last 17 one-dayers against serious opposition. And England thought they had problems.

Lawrence Booth is assistant editor of Wisden.com.

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