The World Cup final seems so long ago, from another age almost before social restrictions became a way of life, but for a handful of England cricketers it was the most recent time they played a one-day international.
Mark Wood, Jofra Archer and Jos Buttler have not played a 50-over match in England colours since that remarkable day in July last year, a measure, too, of how the fixture list (and the pandemic) militates against England selectors being able to put their strongest team on the pitch every time.
The need to rest multi-format players during the winter and the restrictions on moving from bubble to bubble this summer have prevented the trio being involved since the World Cup victory, but with Australia in town for a three-match series that forms part of the ICC’s World Cup Super League (the qualification for the 2023 World Cup), the selectors are eager to show the strongest hand they can. England’s three-match series against Ireland this summer was the first in the Super League, and this represents Australia’s starting point on the road to 2023.
With Jason Roy returning to the squad after a side strain, Joe Root — left out of the T20 squad — back from Yorkshire duty, and Chris Woakes returning from a period of rest, the World Cup band are back together again, with only Liam Plunkett and Ben Stokes missing from the team that reached the pinnacle of achievement in ODI cricket. Stokes will return, of course, when family duties are done in New Zealand, but Plunkett’s final memory as an England player will be as a World Cup winner.
It was Eoin Morgan’s 34th birthday on Thursday and, as he is the oldest member of the squad, the hope is that most of the World Cup-winning team will still be around for the next tournament in India, and it is to that destination that Morgan’s attentions are turned. In his pre-series press conference he spoke at length about how playing three matches in Manchester this week would be a good introduction for the sub-continental-style conditions that England will face in India in three years’ time.
Emirates Old Trafford can be a quick and bouncy pitch, but Morgan is expecting a slow, low turner given the lack of sunshine of late, something he is anticipating eagerly given what he says is his team’s relative weakness in such conditions. He thinks they can become a more rounded and versatile team on slow pitches that discourage batsmen from hitting freely through the line of the ball (England’s defeat in the Champions Trophy semi-final against Pakistan at Cardiff in 2017 and against Sri Lanka in the World Cup at Headingley were cases in point), and emphasised the importance of Root and Adil Rashid in such conditions.
If Root, 29, does not make England’s strongest T20 side right now there is no question of his place in 50-over cricket. Morgan described him as “one of the best in the world”, “versatile” and “underestimated”, noting his low dot-ball percentage, high average and high strike rate.
As for Rashid, Morgan believes that the leg spinner, at 32, is bowling as well as he has ever done in one-day cricket, rating him the “No 1 variation bowler” in the world. Whether Rashid will return to England’s Test match team is a live question and depends, according to Morgan, on the spinner’s drive and ambition. Test matches will put an added strain on his shoulder, though, which may then affect his one-day cricket.
Australia is at full strength and eager to make amends for their World Cup semi-final defeat last year — England hammered Aaron Finch’s team by eight wickets with 107 balls to spare at Edgbaston — and a 5-0 whitewash during the summer of 2018, the previous time these teams met in an ODI series.
Unlike in Test cricket and T20 cricket, where Australia sits at the top of the rankings, Finch’s team are mid-table in ODI cricket, and a little more uncertain in method, caught between the steady approach that underpinned their fine historical record in 50-over tournaments and England’s more gung-ho tactics of the past four years. Finch was suitably effusive in his praise of England, describing them as having set a “benchmark” during the previous World Cup cycle.
In particular, he noted the “firepower” that England possesses with bat and ball, which three of those returning players — Wood, Archer and Buttler — bring to the team most of all. The combination of Archer and Wood was eye-catching in the T20 series and Buttler won the man-of-the-series award for his barnstorming batting, even though he missed the final match.
Interesting though they were, the T20 matches were inevitably frustrating given the limited opportunity for a host of high-class players to stamp their authority on games. The forthcoming series should be much more fulfilling in that regard. Mitchell Starc, Pat Cummins, Archer and Wood are all able to bowl 140km/h-plus thunderbolts, and batsmen such as David Warner, Jonny Bairstow, Roy and Finch will be eager to fight fire with fire. The quality of cricket ought to be excellent.
Finch noted that England had the “wood on his team”, and the facts speak for themselves: in the past three years, the two teams have met 13 times in ODI cricket, and England has won 11 of those matches.
The Times
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