Last Thursday I played my last ever game of football. Before the game I had dared to dream. It was cup finals night, after all, and in recent weeks we had been in rare good form. Here was a chance to go out in style.

But how many get to go out in style? Sport rarely has room for sentimentality. As Sachin Tendulkar has recently shown, only the very great are lucky enough to choose when they retire. Luckier still are those who can look back and say they retired at the right time. Tendulkar might not, who knows? But Paul Collingwood, I suspect, does – the ultimate team man bowed out at the end of the ultimate team effort, the historic Ashes win in 2010/11.

Back then, how many of Collingwood’s team-mates could have been forgiven for thinking that they might be doing something similar in three years time? It’s not often that the hamster wheel of international cricket offers a natural end to a cycle, even rarer when that is in sync with a team’s natural cycle. But in our Ashes-centric world, the back-to-back Ashes always looked like it would be just that – something of a final season finale of the DVD boxset that was Andrew Strauss’ England.

I was going to say nobody gets to write their own scripts, but that is not strictly true. Plenty write, few get to act them out. Now, with the post-production in tatters, it is hard to believe that the script ever got past first draft. But then? With a visionary director, settled cast and extensive crew, what could possibly go wrong?

Nothing. Or at least that is how it seemed in the summer of 2011, as England thrashed India 4-0 to claim a place at the top of the Test rankings. But no production is without its hiccups, and so it proved. First, on location in the UAE, Pakistan dished out a humbling 3-0 defeat. Then, back on set, leading man Kevin Pietersen had his head turned by Bollywood, and fell out spectacularly with Strauss. Despite the resulting change in captaincy, the cast – in personnel and personality – remained broadly the same, and the narrative arc, despite a wobble, appeared to be back on track.

Perhaps this had more to do with Australia than England. Where England had triumphed in India – Alastair Cook revelling in his new leading role, a reintegrated KP to the fore – Australia were involved in their very own horror movie. English set-designers, aided by a rare dry English summer, went about replicating those Indian conditions, and sure enough England retained the Ashes.

If this really was some kind of DVD boxset, then hindsight tells us that was when the network should have pulled the plug. No more, let’s go out on a high. But another Ashes series is a hard thing to say no to, and at the time nobody was telling anyone to retire, or complaining that the same old stars were being wheeled out.

So we were treated to the mother of all surprise endings. Jonathan Trott, Graeme Swann and Steven Finn didn’t make the wrap party. Andy Flower and Kevin Pietersen won’t be seen again. Perhaps Matt Prior, too. Instead of the happy ending of a valedictory tour for this England team, we got to watch the work of Darren Lehmann, a maverick old-school director, and the rebirth of Mitchell Johnson, hitherto typecast as Ashes clown.

In a recent conversation on the subject of worst film endings, my friend Raoul opined that in order to feel the rage and disappointment of a truly awful ending it has to come after what has hitherto been a reasonably good film. He cited LA Confidential and Apocalypse Now as prime examples, and the latter seems to me to be an apt analogy to the recent tour.

The Horror…

Yes, but also strangely reassuring. Sport, and Ashes cricket, remains gloriously unscripted, and England taking for granted beating Australia never felt right. Just as Apocalypse Now is in my eyes still a great film in spite of its ending, I hope this whitewash won’t be the abiding memory of Flower’s England, the team of Swann and Pietersen. They were better than that.

Oh, and that last game of football? We lost. 2-1. No going out in style for me either.