GIVE an English sport official a gun and a foot and he will shoot himself in it.

Nasser Hussain should never have been forced to resign by the self-spiting sack-the-boss English culture.

True, England should have done better at one-day cricket than they have with Hussain in charge.

But they are not going to do any better by chopping and changing their captaincy every time they suffer disappointment.

In any other country, leaders are given time to make mistakes and learn from them. The man who never made mistakes never made anything.

Unfortunately English sport has a zero tolerance policy on making mistakes, so Hussain had to go.

The history books will show he resigned but anyone with at least one eye and half a brain can see his position was made increasingly intolerable over a long period of time.

The sadness is that Hussain, although more comfortable and suited to Test cricket both as a captain and a player, was an excellent captain who had the respect of those above and under him and as great a will to win as any sportsman in the country.

He made mistakes. Some of them, like not bowling Andy Caddick at the end against Australia, were quite elementary, but he should have been given the backing of everybody to learn from his mistakes and develop into a world class captain like they are allowed to do in India, Pakistan and Australia.