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In the aughts, when the internet was the place you went to watch babies bite their big brother’s finger, find out what Ashton Kutcher had for breakfast or follow the Test on your holiday with those two blokes who did the Guardian’s over-by-over, someone made a gif of Rob Key, the memory of which will be instantly familiar to anyone who saw it, even two decades later.

Key was wearing a pair of leather boots and waving a cricket bat about his head while riding on the back of a capybara. There was no point trying to understand the joke. It was just that it was Key. And Key was funny.

Key got it. He was that sort of sportsman, one of the last cult heroes of the county circuit, red-faced and out-of-shape, with a sense of humour so dry you could use his punchlines as kindling. Asked what advice he would give himself at 18, Key answered: “Don’t eat biscuits.” The best thing about playing at Canterbury was “there’s a Sainsbury’s at the ground”. He was a smart captain and a sound batter who regularly scored a thousand runs a summer, a better player than even he seemed to realise.

Key laughed at his own international career, which included a double century at Lord’s and a second spell as part of a crack squad of county specialists selected for the World T20 who ended up losing to the Netherlands.

It makes sense, then, that his stint as the managing director of England men’s cricket has ended up as one long meme. Having said: “Dobbing it on a length at 75mph with the keeper up doesn’t work in Test cricket,” Key has spent the next two years watching England lose to teams doing exactly that while the theme from Curb Your Enthusiasm plays in the background.

Someone is about to switch the music off and the suspicion is that when they do Key is going to be the one man in this England regime left without a chair to sit on.

Two weeks ago, Ben Stokes was being lined up to be the man left standing. But the public reaction persuaded the England and Wales Cricket Board that a popularity contest with the most iconic English player of the past 50 years wasn’t the smartest idea, a point Stokes underlined for them when he spoke at length about just how much public support he’d been given. Besides which, if there’s one of the three men in the leadership team England can do without, it’s probably not the one with 250 wickets and 7,250 runs.

Instead, the blame for all this mess seems to have fallen on the credibility of the team curfew, which, according to reports, was systematically dismantled by Stokes’s management team on the grounds it hadn’t been properly written down. Read between the lines of Stokes’s statement about the curfew: “If you look at the investigations that happened, both internally and with the regulator, nothing was brought against me and Gus in terms of that.”

The mistake was in the direction and management, which, to be fair, probably comes under the purview of the managing director. Key hasn’t been seen since he gave a press conference before the second Test. Meanwhile, England’s new national selector, Marcus North, director of cricket at Durham for the past eight years, has been doing the media rounds all week and even joined in with the team huddle before the start of the Test.

North is close to Stokes and he spoke at some length about how much he thinks of Brendon McCullum, England’s head coach. It’s a shame there aren’t any recent examples of someone with a power base up north coming down to take thing over with the help of a few well-placed allies we could use to illuminate what’s going on.

McCullum? Well, don’t let his easy manner kid you into thinking he does not know how to handle himself in political row. Go ask Ross Taylor, his predecessor as New Zealand captain, or any number of others who have shared a dressing room with him over the years. Stokes has just defended McCullum and North has already said what a great first impression he has made on him in the few weeks they have been colleagues.

Judging by reports of what it would cost the ECB to get rid of McCullum if the team lose this series against New Zealand, they have at least a million-and-one reasons for keeping him. It’s just that the least convincing of them is that he is the right man to teach this next generation of English players how to go about Test cricket.

Key has made plenty of mistakes, most glaringly in the way he has mismanaged England’s central contracts and mishandled relations with a lot of the players dropped along the way, but you wonder if his biggest may turn out to be not taking all this more seriously. Like they say, if you can’t spot the fall guy at the table, it’s because it’s you.