So, it’s a teary-eyed farewell to David Gower’s holiday villa. He’s going to miss it terribly, you know. When you’ve been staying somewhere as idyllic as that, for as long as Gower has – which is to say, approximately 7½ months, give or take the odd Super Eights phase – it can come to feel like your own.

Strange to think, then, that there’s probably another family in there already, enjoying the terrace, the shaded garden with its gate through to the beach, and the decking on the shoreline, with its coffee table and matching chairs. They are possibly not talking about cricket as much, and almost certainly wondering why they keep finding bits of masking tape all over the place (telltale traces of the departed camera crew since time began), but otherwise making themselves at home around the place exactly as if Gower and the Sky Sports cricket World Cup team had never been there before them.

How burdened of heart the former England captain must have felt as he folded his polo shirts and took his trunks down from the washing line one last time. How beset by sadness he must have been as he gathered his shaving things and shower gel from the bathroom and abandoned a half-read Ian McEwan paperback on the shelf in the sitting room. How heavy with premature nostalgia he would have felt as he contemplated whether to leave the uneaten cheese in the fridge for the next people, and risk looking negligent, or whether to throw the cheese away, and risk seeming wasteful.

Days had long since melted into a blissful, unhurried continuum, spent listening to the waves drop lazily on to the beach and watching the gentle play of the warm breeze in Bob Willis’s chinos.

Was it possible to imagine life any other way? How far away Hampshire must have seemed to the Sky Sports front man. And would his dog even recognise him after all this time, or chase him back up his own garden path, snarling wildly?

To say these less than testing broadcast conditions had suited him would be to be guilty of grave understatement. Short of presenting in a towelling robe, Gower couldn’t have looked more like a man with his feet up. The only dark spot came right at the end, when he had to go to a cricket match. Throughout the tournament, the message had been clear: Gower wasn’t going to the cricket; the cricket was going to have to come to Gower. And ultimately, it did.

Large portions of the tournament might have been a distant struggle on far-removed shores, but the final was in Barbados and it was the least Gower could do, in the circumstances, to change out of his flip-flops and mosey over.

We all know what happened next. The game’s great showpiece occasion promptly turned slapstick as scene-stealing umpires unwisely chose the moment to pioneer the breakaway idea of cricket as a nonfloodlit night game. It’ll never catch on.

A crumbly ending, then – but not enough, in and of itself, to spoil it for Gower, who will always have his memories and photographs from this, the vacation of a lifetime, the mother and father of all jollies, the lig to end all ligs. Seven-and-a-half months in a Caribbean hideaway: we should all have to work this hard.

At the same time, a benchmark has been set for the outside broadcasting of cricket and the question everyone is now anxiously asking is where Sky can take things for the forthcoming Test series against West Indies. Given Gower’s new expectations, they can hardly go stuffing him in the usual hutch at Trent Bridge. The man needs four bedrooms, a private swimming pool and seven-day maid service, for heaven’s sake. There is no glass-backed booth in the world that can contain him now.

Our suggestion: stick him on the front at Frinton. Nice people there – none of your riffraff – and many of them in Gower’s age group. No chip shops, it’s true, but convenient, round the clock access to some of the nation’s finest teacakes.

More to the point, you won’t get any beered-up, sun-scorched Barmy Army members wrecking the shot by bouncing up and down in the background with their pants on their heads. Let’s face it, it makes as much sense as spending an entire World Cup in a villa. On the last day of play at the Oval, Gower might actually go to the cricket. Then again, after this last experience, maybe he won’t.

In the meantime, we take it he’ll need a holiday. Barbados looks nice.