England were a one-day team who didn’t know how to top 300 – didn’t even dare to try. Eoin Morgan turned them into the best flat track batting side there’s ever been.

It’s worth taking stock of the scale of that transformation and the conviction of the captain who achieved it.

It’s not like no-one ever tried to improve the England limited overs teams before – and it’s not like they didn’t occasionally have a good spell either – but Morgan recognised there was a self-imposed ceiling to England’s one-day performances and if he could raise that, he would most likely raise standards even when they couldn’t manage to touch it.

The backdrop to Morgan’s tenure

In May 2011, Alastair Cook was named as England’s new one-day captain even though he hadn’t actually been in the team.

Writing about his appointment, Mike Atherton somewhat infamously described him as a ‘plodder’. While Cook did actually start quite well, his somewhat cobbled together white ball approach lacked substance and everyone had long since accepted Athers was right when Cook was eventually sacked and dropped late in 2014, just a couple of months before the 2015 World Cup.

Eoin Morgan took over and for that first tournament pretty much just went along with the bizarre, inflexible, reactionary strategising England had always employed in the shorter formats.

So it was that after six months of solid one-day cricket, England went into the World Cup with a different side. Chris Woakes had been opening the bowling and doing well – he came on first change. Gary Ballance hadn’t played one-day cricket for six months – he came in at number three. James Taylor had been making a decent fist of batting at three – he came in at six.

Moeen Ali opened the batting having never much done it before. Ian Bell opened alongside him having been out of the side a couple of months earlier. It wasn’t so much that the players were bad; it was that they were all, to a man, diminished by the way they’d been used in the years leading up to the competition.

Armed with a fear of failure and a squad of players who’d been pissed about in various ways and had never really been 100% sure what their roles were, England duly crashed out in time-honoured fashion.

Well that isn’t working

Afterwards Peter Moores was sacked as coach and replaced by Trevor Bayliss. However, Morgan wasn’t going to wait until the Australian actually turned up to change things, even if the two men did speak about their plans.

England’s next one-day game, against Ireland, brought debuts for Zafar Ansari, Jason Roy, James Vince, David Willey and Mark Wood. Just as crucially, Adil Rashid was brought back and given a very specific job.

“He used him as a wicket-taker in the middle overs and even at the back end of an innings, giving him the full backing that he might go for runs but that didn’t matter,” said Bayliss recently. “All he wanted from him was wickets and they hit it off.”

Morgan wanted a diverse bowling attack. He wanted fast bowlers, left-armers and all kinds of spin. He wanted options. Interesting options. Distinct options.

That game was ruined by rain, which meant the New Zealand series a month later was the first real sighting of this new team. Jason Roy was dismissed by the very first ball of the first match.

No matter, England proceeded to rack up 408-9 with hundreds for Joe Root and Jos Buttler. Rashid hit 69 off 50 balls and then took 4-55. England won.

Most strikingly of all, they had been 202-6 in the 30th over, only for Buttler to press on rather than consolidate.

“If you scrape up to 250 in 50 overs, that’s not going to win you too many games any more,” he pointed out. “So you have to be looking at 300-plus at least.”

In the next game Morgan led the way with 88 off 47 balls but England fell short of their target of 379 in 46 overs by 14 runs. Defeat in the next match was the interesting one though.

The crime of not batting out the overs

England batted first in Southampton and made 302 in 45.2 overs. Ben Stokes, at five, made 68 off 47 balls. Sam Billings, at seven, made 34 off 16. New Zealand got home for the loss of seven wickets with an over to spare.

You could almost hear “If only we’d batted out the overs” on the wind from many English fans and commentators. Not batting out the overs has long been seen as a crime.

Not to Morgan.

Morgan’s view is that runs are there to be actively scored, not passively acquired simply through one’s presence at the crease.

Recognising that this kind of defeat was exactly the time to get his message across about how he wanted his team to play, he said: “It’s not a huge thing for me that we have to bat 50 overs. It doesn’t disappoint me.

“We’re trying to change our process and mindset with the bat, which may take time. We’ve come a long way in the last three games, scoring 300-plus in each of them – which is a huge achievement, and a big turnaround. I want the guys to continue with that mindset, and not worry about batting 50 overs.

“I think that makes guys hesitate and question their natural way of playing. I don’t want that to happen. For a long time we looked like getting 350 to 360. That’s a huge plus for us, because for a long time we’ve never even thought about getting that sort of score.”

In that same interview Morgan did concede that there was a time and a place for reining things in, but only if the team’s broader direction of travel started to go “drastically wrong.”

The message was clear. But did he really mean it?

Show not tell

There is a false belief in cricket punditry that a player can be told to “go out and play their natural game” and then that will inevitably happen.

But human beings are more complicated than that. Most don’t take what they’re told at face value. And with good reason. A player’s ‘natural game’ is often only accepted when it comes off. The exact same approach can be scorned when it doesn’t.

Morgan was a captain who fundamentally understood this. He wouldn’t necessarily back his players when they failed, but he most certainly would if he felt they had failed while approaching an innings how he wanted them to.

He would also demonstrate what he wanted through his actions. It’s always more persuasive if you can show your audience something without explicitly telling them it.

In the next game the captain made 113 off 82 balls as England chased down 350 to win – at the time their highest successful chase.

The game after that with his side 20-2 chasing 192 in 26 overs, Morgan slog-swept his first ball to deep midwicket. It was a rubbish shot. England won the match.

“We’d be three or four down and Morgs would still go out there and take the game by the throat,” recalled Bayliss. “Even if it didn’t work all the time, it gave others the confidence to play that way and push the ceiling.”

But arguably team selection was a more important indicator of how he wanted to run things. The two centurions in that first match against New Zealand – Root and Buttler – may well have been survivors from the failed World Cup campaign, but they must have looked around at their new team-mates and immediately understood they were being asked to play differently.

The constitution of a side sends a message to each of the players who comprise it.

Winning totals

Central to all of this was recognition that there was no point compromising and eking out a score that probably still wouldn’t win you the match. Doing that was just saving face. Far better to at least set out on a path to victory, even if you collapsed on your arse before you got there.

Morgan felt that if he could encourage his batters to keep attacking, they would effectively get more practice – more experience – of playing that way. They would then become better at it. He wanted them to become accustomed to making big totals and to be unfazed by massive chases.

This reached its apogee on June 19, 2018, when England took the Australia bowling attack apart as if it were a giant Lego penis and grandma was coming over.

If some of the finer points of chasing in difficult conditions were to suffer as a result of this single-minded pursuit of large scores, the truth was those matches were far less common – and in any case, teams who can chase big targets are still reasonably equipped to chase small ones.

The upshot was that England very quickly reached a point where Eoin Morgan was no longer the exciting one. Given the Irishman came into the side playing shots that you’re still unlikely to see today, that was an incredible development.

Morgan was at one point the best one-day batter England had ever had – a cold and clinical chaser who could wallop sixes using only his wrists – and that whole unprecedented period of batting is now utterly overshadowed by the job he did turning two wins in six in the 2015 World Cup into not-exactly-outright victory in 2019.

England’s most significant modern captain?

There’s a tendency to think that an England captain can’t really rank among the greats unless he was in charge of the Test team and beat Australia or whatever. But we’d question that.

The transformation job Morgan did with England’s white ball teams was so jarring and complete, from perennial underachievement to pace-setters for the rest of the world, that we consider it an unparalleled leadership feat in modern English cricket.

It’s also hard to imagine that those teams won’t also live on in his image for at least the medium-term under Jos Buttler’s captaincy. Time will tell on that, but it feels like Morgan has instilled fundamental principles that will persist for at least a while.

He may also prove to have more of an influence on the Test team than you might think.

Brendon McCullum may seem the obvious link between the two England outfits with Morgan having spoken himself of his admiration for the New Zealander’s leadership. But it is Morgan’s philosophy and methodology that Test captain Ben Stokes knows best.

Speaking after England chased 378 to beat India in his fourth match in charge, Stokes said: “I spent a lot of time under Eoin’s captaincy and I’ve taken a lot of what his messaging and how he wanted the team in one-day cricket to go forward and I’ve brought his mentality and his ethos around cricket into this Test environment and everybody’s responded so well to it.”

It took the England red ball team six years to work out that they had unprecedented access to the inner workings of one of the finest elite sporting sides in the world. But they got there eventually. It’ll be interesting to see what they make of it.

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We’re gravely worried about Eoin Morgan. We’re worried he’s lost sight of the basics.

Speaking to Sky Sports earlier this week, Morgan suggested that he would consider dropping himself if he couldn’t regain batting form. He did however also make a point of saying that he’d come out of every spell of poor form he’d ever had, which kind of makes it sound like he can’t actually envisage circumstances where this whole ‘dropping yourself’ thing would actually apply.

That wasn’t the worrying bit though. The worrying bit was when he was talking about this possibility and said: “I wouldn’t stand in the way of a team winning the World Cup.”

We’d seen two versions of this quote, with a key distinction between them, so we thought we’d better investigate. The other version of the quote has him saying, “I wouldn’t stand in the way of the team winning the World Cup.”

That version’s okay. That version makes sense. If that were what Morgan had said, we could safely infer that “the team” was England, in which case, no, you definitely should not stand in the way of a World Cup win. That is very definitely not your job as England captain.

Unfortunately, we listened to the interview and he actually said “a team” which is obviously a good deal more concerning – because which team was he talking about?

If you are England captain, the England cricket team is not “a team” it is “the team” or even “my team”. If you are England cricket captain, “a team” definitely refers to one of the other teams in the tournament. This means that you should stand in the way of “a team” winning the World Cup because that is what you are supposed to do.

It is impossible for us to deduce which team Morgan is referring to and we certainly won’t be pointing out that it’s probably Ireland because that is exactly the kind of thing that mental right-wing newspapers do on the rare occasions England’s greatest-ever limited overs captain isn’t winning world tournaments or crafting one of the best white ball teams the game has seen.

In summary, it would be best if Eoin Morgan chose to stand in the way of other teams’ World Cup wins. If he for some reason sees fit to not do so in one particular case, we’d prefer to not know about it so that we don’t accidentally and unwillingly find ourself fractionally overlapping with some frothing columnist with dementedly specific ideas about what an England cricket captain should be.

(It’s also possible Morgan said, “er… team,” but really that’s no less fishy. That just sounds evasive.)

Please sign up for our email, unless you’re hoping for some sort of campaign against Eoin Morgan, because let us tell you right now, you absolutely will not be getting that.

England are finally putting out their first team. And people aren’t happy.

Speaking ahead of the T20 series against India, Eoin Morgan came as close as anyone has so far to articulating the principles underpinning England’s 2021 squad rotation policy. (We’re not going to call it a ‘controversial’ squad rotation policy because that’s what journalists who disagree with things say when they not-so-secretly want to say ‘stupid’. We’re not even going to stretch to ‘controversially-executed’ for the same reason.)

Asked about rumbling dissatisfaction with players missing Test matches, Morgan told Sky Sports that he, Test captain Joe Root and the rest of England’s management team regularly talk about the series or tournaments they want to target.

“Obvious things like World Cups for us [the white ball squad]. So it’s important that we all are on the same page, because I fully understand that Tests are extremely important to us and obviously the Ashes at the end of the year off the back of the World Cup are going to be extremely challenging – but also there needs to be a lot of planning and structure in behind decisions that are made.”

Expanding on how he and Root felt about the impact of rotation, he said: “If you sat both of us down at the end of the year and we won the World Cup or came close, or challenged Australia or came close, the both of us would be very, very happy with the decisions that are made.”

While Morgan never actually said so explicitly, this seems to us to confirm that the whole year is built around these two parallel goals with everything else seen as subordinate.

Sacrifices

Morgan also pointed out that it is normally he, not Root, who has to put up with his players being rested.

“To be honest, from a captain’s point of view I very rarely get our strongest squad together,” he said. “So for him not to have his strongest squad for one series is a very small sacrifice in the grand scheme of things – given bio-secure bubbles, the schedule and the pinnacle of winning an Ashes series away from home.”

A lot of fans – us included – struggled to come to terms with the notion that England deliberately compromised a Test tour of India, even if it almost certainly didn’t affect the result. This is because a Test tour of India is supposed to be one of cricket’s Big Deals.

But this is where 2021: The Year of Absolutely Everything has left us.

If you compare a Test tour of India to a T20 tour of India, the former would almost universally be considered a bigger deal. But that’s not the way England are looking at their year.

England are looking at 2021 and saying, “Okay, we can realistically only target two things here – one red ball thing and one white ball thing – so what are those things going to be and how are we going to give ourselves the best chances of winning them?”

No-one is allowed to say this out loud because the conclusions which have been reached are very uncool to India. However, the truth is that the Ashes and the World T20 are the pegs off which everything else is hanging.

What this means is that preparation for the World T20 in India outranks Test cricket in India on the basis that the latter is not massively relevant to an away Ashes series.

As Jos Buttler explained in a separate interview: “It makes complete sense to be here in India, ahead of a World Cup which will be played in these conditions, to play as best as we can in this series against what is an excellent India side, in their own conditions. It is probably the last time we’ll have a full-strength squad available.”

(Apparently England didn’t massively care about the World Test Championship in the end because that didn’t seem to be a primary target. Or perhaps they privately concluded that they didn’t actually stand much chance of qualifying.)

The IPL

For what it’s worth, this line of thinking seems to be what is informing attitudes to the IPL as well. It’s seen as a great way to test players under pressure in big T20 games in India.

According to Morgan: “As a white-ball captain planning towards World Cups, certainly over the last five years, we’ve used [the IPL] and benefited from it hugely in the development of our players and the confidence that we’ve built in the changing room in guys like Ben Stokes and Jos Buttler going there and being MVP and bringing the knowledge that they’ve learnt into our changing room.

“The international schedule is what it is – it seems to cater for the majority of the time in and around the IPL. We see other boards around the world almost opening that window as well.”

At this point it is worth mentioning that the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) also now recognises that there is an IPL window and acknowledges that if it doesn’t respect it, England players are a lot less likely to get picked up.

For the reasons given above, England WANT their players in the IPL.

While there is a lot of talk about England players ‘missing’ the home Test matches against New Zealand to play in the IPL, that is a bit misleading because the IPL was essentially scheduled first. While the exact dates weren’t announced, the ECB knew the window in which it was taking place and had been trying to avoid scheduling matches during that time. The New Zealand Tests only got banged in at the start of this year because coronavirus has left the board short of a bob or two and also as a thank you to Sky Sports for how they dealt with that situation.

“But I think they should be prioritising differently”

Are you angry about which matches England have chosen to prioritise and which they have chosen to play at reduced strength?

Really you should be angry that England are playing so many matches that prioritisation is necessary. If you spread all of these major engagements out over more than nine months, the national side could maybe target a Test tour of India AND the Ashes AND the World T20. Imagine!

If, however, the idea of playing a manageable volume of cricket is not one you feel you can get behind, then we’re afraid you’re just going to have to accept that there is no universally agreed upon hierarchy of international cricket fixtures.

Unless something changes, players are going to be rested from England games, and for as long as players are being rested from England games, there is a pretty good chance that they’ll be rested from games you care about.

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Here’s a thing. Six lads that you’ve heard of are going to play a one-on-one form of cricket called the Ultimate Kricket Challenge this Christmas and New Year. (Or at least that’s when it’s going to be broadcast on Star Sports and Disney Hotstar.)

The lads in question are Rashid Khan, Eoin Morgan, Yuvraj Singh, Chris Gayle, Kevin Pietersen and Andre Russell.

The Ultimate Kricket Challenge website does not yet reflect this, featuring as it does “Kevin Peterson” and also Shahid Afridi, who presumably decided he had other things to do.

Selfish cricket

But yes, you did read that one-on-one bit correctly. In Pietersen’s own words: “It’s one versus one. In a cage.”

In one way, this seems a good fit for KP, who is not exactly world-renowned for his ability to get on well with team-mates for prolonged periods.

In another, far more significant way, it is terrible for KP, because he is fairly shit at bowling.

Pietersen is (by one narrow and somewhat arbitrary definition) the worst Test bowler of all time. That said, he is at least in some sense a Test bowler, in that he is a man who was considered good enough to very occasionally bowl in Test cricket.

Eoin Morgan is not a Test bowler. With just two professional wickets to his name, Eoin Morgan is not really a bowler at all.

Eoin Morgan would appear to be at quite a grave disadvantage in an individual format of the game where you have to do all your batting and bowling yourself.

Here’s Morgan spinning himself a catch, seemingly oblivious to the fact the ball’s ablaze.

As The Iceman, you’d think he’d be extra concerned about that.

The Ultimate Kricket Challenge does seem to be highly flammable though. Pretty much everything in the promo video catches light.

Here’s KP throwing his bat and instantly incinerating it purely through the power of tantrum.

The ultimate challenge

The Ultimate Kricket Challenge doesn’t actually seem like all that much of a challenge to us. Surely if you’re the only bowler, the ultimate cricket challenge would be a timeless Test on the flattest of flat pitches?

That seems like a real test, but this particular ‘challenge’ merely comprises two innings of 15 balls.

As far as we can tell, runs are scored not – as the term might suggest – by running, but by hitting the ball in certain “scoring zones” offering one, two, three, four or six runs.

There’s also a 12-run “bullseye”. Sadly we couldn’t unearth any information on where exactly that is located. On the bowler’s testicles perhaps?

The somewhat confusing rules also state that five runs will be deducted for the loss of a wicket and that, “Batsman is declared out incase of a dot ball, catch, run out, bowled, hit wicket, stumped or interference.”

So if we’re reading that correctly, a dot ball cannot be a dot ball as a dot ball automatically results in the loss of five runs. Perhaps if there were such a thing as a five-run zone, you could engineer a dot ball by hitting it there before getting run out – but there isn’t one, so you can’t.

Oh wait, how do you get run out if you’re not running?

Format

In keeping with more traditional cricket tournaments, you are more likely to qualify for the Ultimate Kricket Challenge semi-finals than not because the round robin phase only reduces the competitors from six to four.

The semi-finals and final will be played on the same day and then someone who isn’t Eoin Morgan will be crowned champion.

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In some ways it was hard to know what year it was. Playing their first one-day international since winning the World Cup, England made 258-8 and were then conspicuously short of weirdness in the middle overs with the ball.

The difference is that this was day one of a project to build a new side for the next World Cup, rather than a limp performance in the group stages of the same competition. You’d trust Eoin Morgan to work out what is and isn’t going to work before 2023, wouldn’t you? We’d trust him to do most things. (Maybe not dentistry or anything like that, but most jobs that involve little more than clear thinking and common sense.)

Speaking about the defeat afterwards, England’s captain said: “Failure is a huge platform to try and catapult yourself forward, and learn from your mistakes.”

This is interesting, not so much for the desire to move forward (international captains have long been disappointingly averse to moving backwards, sideways, or even diagonally) but for the mode of conveyance.

When we think of catapults, we tend to think of the siege scenes in The Lord of the Rings. Sieges constitute quite a large proportion of those films. If Lord of the Rings characters aren’t gazing wanly into each other’s eyes or speaking in feared tones about some ancient mystical threat or other, they’re generally involved in a siege.

Catapults feature prominently (so do trebuchets, but let’s not get into that whole thing) and while the projectiles are usually rocks, we’ve a dim recollection of an orc climbing onto one too. We really wanted to watch this scene again to see what happened to that orc as that would give us some idea whether Morgan’s correct to see catapulting as a legitimate way to get from A to B or whether he’s massively, massively incorrect.

We can’t find the scene in question and we can’t be bothered to watch all of the films from start to finish to find it. We can however get a feel for what might have happened by looking at how the catapult normally works.

For example, according to The Lord of the Rings films this is what happens when you catapult a rock at a stone wall.

When you catapult a rock at a stone wall, the rock obliterates the stone wall.

The way Morgan talks, being catapulted involves making rapid and desirable progress. But what about the landing?

Imagine that you’re the rock. Maybe you envision yourself soaring through the air before spidermanning to the wall, ready for action.

We’re here to tell you that would not happen. We’re here to tell you that your limbs couldn’t sufficiently soften the impact, so there are no ninja moves here, there is only a sad smear of blood and gristle.

‘Catapulting yourself forward’ sounds like a great and positive thing, but it is actually a very uncontrolled way to progress. We would far rather see things go a little slower. You’ve got almost four years, Eoin.

We have a theory that middle-aged coffee hipsters obsess over the drink precisely because it doesn’t matter.

We use an AeroPress to make coffee. It’s basically a coffee syringe. The really delightful and wonderful thing about the AeroPress is the brevity of the clean-up operation. Once you’ve finished pushing the coffee through the filter to make your drink, you just take the end off and push a bit more to deposit a puck of coffee grounds into the compost. It comes out with a satisfying ‘pock’ sound, but the key part is that because you’ve already pushed everything through, all you need to do is rinse off the end of the AeroPress and it’s good to go again.  

It’s a design that satisfies precisely because it’s so simple. So obviously people massively complicate matters. 

They actually have an AeroPress World Championships each year and the winning recipe is generally a study in anal retentive complexity.

The King Cricket recipe is: ‘Add coffee, add hot water, push through’. The recipe of the 2018 AeroPress World Champion demands 34.9g of coffee (grind size 8), 85 degree water and a 30-second press and there are any number of finicky instructions beyond that.

It’s insane, but it’s also a weirdly relaxing thing to be aware of. Because it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter at all. And you don’t have to use this recipe yourself.

If you have a stressful job and maybe a child or two (or, Lord help you, even more children than that) then your brain is basically just a gelatinous blue goop by about 8pm. The last thing you want to do at that time of day is think about anything of consequence. 

What could be less important than watching other people worry about a drink that you aren’t even going to make because it’s the evening? This is how we have on occasion found ourself watching AeroPress World Championship recipes on YouTube. It is the lowest stakes viewing imaginable. Almost all coffee-related videos are. (Our number one complete-loss-of-perspective-when-worrying-about-coffee YouTube moment was a guy making coffee while camping who wanted 17g of coffee. He had a 16g scoop and reluctantly concluded that he could get close if he heaped it slightly. “We’re just going to have to eyeball it,” he lamented with a sad look in his eye.)

Watching this nonsense basically amounts to learning things that you don’t need to remember. When you otherwise have to think about and remember lots of things that do matter, this is weirdly calming. It’s almost like rinsing out your synapses.

Never underestimate the psychological value of unimportant shit. It doesn’t have to be coffee. We’d guess that model railways did a similar thing for some people back when they were a thing. That’s not what matters in this context though. What’s important here is that coffee is a very modern synapse rinse and as a consequence you’d do well to get to the age of 33 without drinking any of the stuff.

Because that’s what Eoin Morgan somehow managed. Deep into his report on the second T20 International between New Zealand and England, Wisden editor Lawrence Booth casually dropped the jaw-dropping fact that Morgan only had his first taste of coffee last week.

There are two big questions here.

1. How did Morgan go 33 years without having a coffee?
2. What monumental development finally persuaded him to give it a go?

Not being in New Zealand at the minute and not having Morgan’s mobile number either, we asked Lawrence. He was sort of able to answer the second question, but not the first.

He said: “It was a question out of the blue from a local reporter. The implication of the answer was that he’d never tasted coffee before, but had been told NZ coffee was very good, so he gave it a try.” (Morgan said it was terrible, incidentally. In New Zealand’s defence, we’ve established that Morgan is far from an authority on this subject.)

So how did Eoin Morgan go 33 years without having a coffee? Was that the first time in his entire life that someone had told him that coffee was nice? Did someone close to him have a bad experience with coffee when he was very young? Had he never been tired before?

Maybe he’s just one of those people, you’re thinking; one of those people who doesn’t try things; one of those people who takes a firm position on a food or drink without any evidence, like a four-year-old. (We hate these people. Grow up. Just try the thing.)

But it’s not that. We know Morgan’s not a non-trier because eventually he did try it.

This week’s experiment suggests it wasn’t a deliberate policy, it was simply something he never did. Eoin Morgan hung around on Earth for 33 years without ever once thinking to take a sip of coffee.  

Like so much about Morgan, this spectacularly long-term coffee avoidance is very mysterious. It’s not that he didn’t like coffee (not until last week anyway). He’s just… avoided it.

What does this say about him? It feels like a small thing that betrays something larger. It feels like a window into his psyche.

2019 Cricket World Cup, Game 24, Afghanistan v England

Eoin Morgan faced fewer balls than Joe Root and made not far off twice as many runs. Joe Root made a very boring 88 at quicker than a run a ball. Eoin Morgan only hit four fours.

None of the above really makes sense and nor did Morgan’s unquenchable thirst for hitting the ball at someone – or something – in the stands. He did it 17 times. What was he aiming for?

Even in an era when milkshake has become many people’s weapon of choice, a cricket ball fired from a cricket bat is a very strange thing with which to set about someone.

The only thing we can think – and this is very much a working theory – is that there was someone in the temporary stand who’d somehow offended England’s captain. If you’ve seen the back of that stand, it’s a terrifyingly rickety scaffolding construction. You could definitely take the whole thing out if you managed to catch one of the lower supports with a firmly-hit lofted drive.

There was a time when England’s captain was just about the most exciting other-worldly batsman around. How times change.

Eoin Morgan’s big thing used to be flitting between flappy-wristed paddle shots where you couldn’t really work out if he was batting left or right handed and whopping great big solid-wristed sixes. But now half the batsmen in the world play like that, so he’s had to come up with a new thing.

Eoin Morgan’s new thing is ‘not smiling’. Whatever is happening in the match, you can pretty much guarantee that Morgan won’t be smiling or presenting any sort of facial expression at all really.

Let us tell you about the other members of England’s World Cup squad

Eoin Morgan has the air of a man who isn’t going to tolerate any of your shit. You probably didn’t even know you had shit until you saw Morgan’s unsmiling face. Now you realise that you are awash with the stuff.

Morgan isn’t going to tolerate any of it. Not one bit. Not even the really minor inconsequential stuff. When it comes to your shit, Eoin Morgan is saying no. Particularly if you are Alex Hales.

As we correctly deduced yesterday, plenty of England players are completely fed up with Alex Hales and Morgan is definitely one of them.

ESPNCricinfo reports he has said there has been, “a complete breakdown of trust between the team and Alex.”

Without going into specifics, Morgan made it clear that this breakdown of trust came about because of all of Hales’ shit.

“We’ve been working extremely hard over the last 18 months to try and build that team culture and established values that we could adhere to,” he said. He added that, “as a group, culture is extremely important to us.”

Hales apparently “demonstrated a lack of respect” for this culture.

For some reason cricketers talk about ‘culture’ far more often than anyone else in the world. At the same time, they give details about what that culture comprises far less often than anyone else in the world.

This whole Alex Hales affair gives us a few clues though. It could be that the England one-day team considers any or all of the following to be unacceptable behaviour.

• Kicking a bloke in the head when he’s lying on the floor
• Lying to police
• Getting yourself into a position where a naked selfie is being disseminated via social media
• Cheating on your girlfriend
• Taking recreational drugs when you’re supposed to be all serious about the World Cup

Eoin Morgan is the kind of guy who’d look at you in disgust for making a self-deprecating joke. Eoin Morgan is the kind of man who’d be pissed off at you for stacking his dishwasher because you’d have done it wrong.

We’d be highly surprised if Eoin Morgan’s personal threshold didn’t mean that he considered all of Alex Hales’ recent behaviour to be shit that he was unwilling to tolerate.

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The rarely-sighted White-Clothed Morgan was thought to have been extinct, but there are now hopes that it could return to its habitat at Lord’s as early as this summer.

In a week in which Adil Rashid and Alex Hales both pressed pause on their first-class careers, Morgan has once again shown himself to be one step ahead of the crowd.

When Rashid announced his decision, we floated the idea that for all the talk of focusing and specialising, first-class cricket might actually provide important base training on which short format cricketers can build.

Morgan agrees. Speaking to Sky Sports, he said he was looking to play in the County Championship this season.

“The reason I’ve always worked trying to play red ball cricket is my technique isn’t very good and I always struggle my first 20 balls and I’m a slow starter.

“Striving to play red ball cricket always made me work on my technique a little bit more. My technique’s normally okay [against the red ball] and I tend to hit it further and play it later.

“That’s why I’ve been hesitant to make a decision [like Rashid’s]. It’s not been having aspiration to play Test cricket – I don’t.”

If others take a similar view, this would be good news for the County Championship and consequently the Test team. However, they should probably still trim the competition by a few matches to persuade the likes of Hales and Rashid that the workload would be productive and not counterproductive.