Michael Vaughan says Alastair Cook is taking the right approach to trying to play his way back into form despite his continuing struggles.
The England captain scored just 11 runs in the first innings of the first Test against the West Indies on Monday before Ian Bell, Joe Root and Ben Stokes made big scores, and he has now failed to hit a century in a top-level international for two years.
But Vaughan, whose pronouncements will be read more carefully than usual while he is in the running to become the national team's new cricket director, wrote in his column for the Daily Telegraph: "Cook did not look too bad. His foot movement was pretty good. He had good balance in his forward defensive, which is a good sign.
"He has a tendency to move his right foot outside off stump and play across his front pad, but he was not doing that as much. He left well and the ball that got him was decent. It was angled across him, and nipped back through the gate. Yes, he could have defended it, but it was not a bad cherry to receive early in your innings."
Batsmen, of which Vaughan was one, find it very difficult to quickly turn around bad form, the former England captain explained, and he said Jonathan Trott and Gary Ballance have been dealing with the same problem as Cook.
"Negative thoughts and doubts that build up when you are a batsman without runs or enough recent cricket," Vaughan said. "Everything seems that much quicker. You start to see every fielder. In fact you do not see gaps, you see fielders. Thoughts creep in about how things could go wrong, you start thinking about how you might get out.
"It is the nature of confidence when batting. I always say batsmen lose confidence, not form. The players who can switch quickly from poor form to good form are the geniuses."