Particularly in the last couple of races, I can’t help feeling that the BBC MotoGP commentary team are being rather generous towards James Toseland.

Everyone likes Toseland, and rightly so – he seems like a thoroughly decent chap. And he’s a good rider – his two World Superbike titles were hardly accidental.

But Steve Parrish and Charlie Cox have pretty much given up looking at the facts.

At Indianapolis, Toseland finished 6th – a place behind team-mate Colin Edwards – which equalled his best result in MotoGP. This was trumpeted as a fantastic result. It was all right.

The fact, though, is Toseland has never finished higher than 6th. When Edwards has taken three podiums since the two have been team-mates, that’s not good enough. But it’s not spectacularly bad, either.

It got really silly at Misano at the weekend, however, when Toseland’s 10th place was called a good result. Matt Roberts’s column described his performance as “encouraging”. Why do we have such low expectations?

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that Toseland is rubbish and doesn’t deserve his place in the MotoGP paddock. He’s doing okay, and isn’t out of place in the top flight.

But he consistently under-performs compared to his team-mate, so it wouldn’t be criminal for Tech 3 Yamaha to see if someone else might not do a better job.

Which might well happen – and it would be very sad to see no Brit in MotoGP again next season. But we shouldn’t be surprised if that comes to be.