Whoever is appointed England team director (and Andy Flower is the red-hot favourite going into this week’s interviews), he faces a daunting challenge over the next five months. He needs to arm the one-day team with some genuine firepower ahead of the World Twenty20 and find a bowling attack with the capacity to take 20 wickets a game in the Ashes.

No pressure, then.

This winter has been far tougher than could have been imagined. A captain was lost, and a coach, and too many matches to bear reflection.

But much of the raw material remains good, and great heart will have been taken from Andrew Flintoff’s strong finish. With career-best figures of five for 19, including a hat-trick, he ended a night in St Lucia on a podium rather than a pedalo, and in the process refloated that shakiest of ocean-going vessels, English self-belief.

Flower spoke afterwards with the confidence of a man who spies the winning line. He now has an achievement against his name, England’s first ODI series win in the Caribbean, albeit with an assist from John Dyson, and his chief rivals are looking wan.

Micky Arthur is barely comfortable being linked to the England job; his loyalties remain with South Africa, though he might be persuaded to jump ship should the offer be big enough. John Wright is arguably too long in the tooth. The England job requires energy and Wright may have expended too much on India. Flower may not have much of a CV but he ought to have the appetite for the long haul, though that might be killed by a heavy Ashes defeat.

At this point, though, he is forming his vision, and it incorporates the players meeting greater standards of fitness. “We have only just scraped by in this one-day series,” he said. “But we had time before weekend matches to think about what we did and we used the breaks as a training camp. It has to be a habit that is formed and lives with the players forever.”

Flower added that England needed to look at how players spent time between tours, a veiled reference to some of them arriving out of condition.

Samit Patel was kicked off the team for not meeting his fitness targets and Steve Harmison, by his own admission, arrived in India before Christmas unfit for service.

Flintoff’s performance on Friday was, on one level, of no great significance in that wickets can be easy to come by towards the end of a one-day game. Bowling fast and straight, as Flintoff did, is often sufficient in such situations and it certainly was in this instance.

But on another level, his contribution was crucial: this was a vital match for a team desperate for a trophy and for Flintoff, still smarting from accusations that he played a part in Kevin Pietersen’s downfall, it was important he returned to the heart of the dressing-room. That was only going to happen with a match-winning effort such as this, his first of the winter.

He can now head off to the Indian Premier League with his head held high and free from accusations that he is compromising his fitness.