The best of times, the worst of times
The best, the greatest, the swashbucklingest, the most front-leg-clearing, sightscreen-peppering, bat-swishing white-ball warriors England has ever produced. When it comes to talking about this breezy, fun, adrenal England 50-over team, it seems in the end we all turn into Don King.
What a pleasure it has been to watch England’s one day cricketers this summer. That hilariously enjoyable tie at Trent Bridge in June has been followed by eight wins, one defeat and throughout a genuine starburst of white-ball brio. Great fun: but also disorientating for those raised on the building-a-platform years, the spectacle of English cricketers struggling manfully with their own corseted inhibitions, a team of flushed and stricken Mr Darcy’s forced, repeatedly, to dance the rhumba.
Understandably the success of Eoin Morgan’s fast-forward team has brought a certain drunken abandon. Love is in the air. Michael Vaughan, who saw plenty of lows and a few real highs in his own time, has made a convincing case that the current lot are the best group of one-day cricketers England have produced. Last week Nasser Hussain said something similar during a Sky Sports commentary. Even these august, sombre, reliably snarky pages have produced the interesting suggestion that the shortest route to selecting an all-time England ODI XI may be to pick most of this lot and have done with it.
Still, it all feels a bit hasty. The new era was effectively born at the start of last summer when Paul Farbrace’s cheerful interim team took New Zealand for a giddy 408 at Edgbaston. Since then England have won 17 of 28 completed matches against New Zealand, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Australia and South Africa, with series defeats against the last two.
If the sheer vim of their batting has been startling, Pakistan have been the perfect opponents for this New England, a baggier, soggier, agreeably pointed impersonation of Old England, complete with underpowered batting, paunchy fielding and plodding, grimacing bowlers. In adverts for slimming products evangelical dieters are often pictured holding out a vast oversized pair of trousers, all the better to illustrate their own transformation. For England, Pakistan have been that pair of oversized trousers, a most flattering opponent for a team who over the next 18 months will face the more rigid, unforgiving lines of series in India and Australia, followed by South Africa at home and the 17-day curio of another home Champions Trophy.
The best ever: it is at least a novel conversation to have. Let’s face it, there just hasn’t seemed the need until now. The best ever England ODI team sounds like something that might crop up alongside talk of the greatest Welsh kung-fu movies, the top 10 best-selling Romanian jazz funk bands. The worst England ODI team look a more taxing line of investigation. We all have our favourites. How about the team who lost 18 of 22 games between 25 October 1989 and 16 February 1991, a run that began with defeat to India in Kanpur as Chetan Sharma, a fast bowler who never scored a first-class hundred, rattled off a match-winning 101 off 96 balls?
Or the 1996 World Cup team, thrashed to pieces by Sanath Jayasuriya as Phil DeFreitas gamely sent down his terrible off-breaks? Or the tourists who were beaten 3-0 in Zimbabwe, hustled out for 118 in the final game with five ducks for Crawley, Hussain, Irani, White and Silverwood? The 2000-01 vintage reeled off an 11-match losing streak. The 2011 World Cup team lost to Ireland and Bangladesh. My own favourite was the 5-0 thrashing by Sri Lanka in 2006 when a team with Alastair Cook, Ian Bell and Andrew Strauss in the top four scored 321 at Durham and still lost inside 38 overs.
The reason for dwelling on these pressure points is simply to make the point that, for once, the comparison between eras and times has some meaning, if only because the bad times have been so very bad. One-day cricket may be an ever-evolving state of the art but there are a couple of ways of judging teams in different eras: relative success against their peers; and the less tangible, more emotional gauge of a team’s basic feel and style and trajectory.
It seems a fair starting point to suggest modern one-day cricket began in 1987 with the Benson & Hedges Challenge in Perth, with its weird America’s Cup-themed shirts, gold watches, Ian Botham in full paunchy ringlet-tossing pomp, and the sense of watching the moustached buccaneers of some new world coming into view through the mists.
Since then England have had perhaps four notable 50-over peaks. First came the Gooch-powered team who beat India by 35 runs in Mumbai to win a World Cup semi-final. The 1992 World Cup finalists still look pretty strong too, with Gooch-Botham-Stewart-Hick-Fairbrother-Lamb an all-star top six, backed up by a crafty swing and seam attack. Adam Hollioake’s mix of ultimate bits and pieces men – plus some genuine stars - won a Champions Trophy in 1997 while having an indecent-looking amount of fun. The class of 2004-05 reached another final and then ended up going toe to toe with the great Aussie team of Ponting, McGrath and Gilchrist.
Beyond that the pickings are thin. Above all the abiding image of the last decade is that sense of trapped energy, the endearing cartoon-hamster friskiness of Bell at the top of the order, the mannered congealment of the middle overs, the crease-bound disintegration faced with a pair of even semi-competent spinners.
And really it is here, in the sense of liberation in the batting that this team takes off. England have never fielded a top eight of such uncluttered attacking talent. There are some obviously outstanding component parts. Joe Root has a fair claim on the title of England’s best one-day batsman; not just on the stats but for his breathtakingly high-craft combination of balance, skill, innovation and other gears. Jos Buttler is the team’s other real all-time ace. Nobody in any ODI team anywhere has played more than 50 ODIs scored at 120 runs per 100 balls and averaged 38. On the stats, never mind the thrill of watching him strike the ball, Buttler is as good as there’s ever been coming in at six or seven.
Elsewhere Jason Roy and Alex Hales are a prolific opening partnership, although 20 of Roy’s 29 inning have come in England. Ben Stokes is all explosive talent in reserve. Eoin Morgan, for all his weakness against high-class bowling, still has a monstrous one-day record.
Beyond this it is a measure of how clearly white-ball cricket is a batsman’s game that this team could be considered England’s best ever when it contains no really outstanding bowlers. A fit, grooved Steven Finn would improve the current attack. Darren Gough in his pomp would take both the new ball and the death overs. Graeme Swann was several cuts above the spin attack. Alan Mullally would lope into the team. Andrew Flintoff, England’s best ever all-round ODI player, would improve the bowling, batting and fielding.
Beyond that the current team teach us a few other things. Most obviously that you don’t actually need to play 100 games to get it: no one in the team, with the exception of Morgan, has more than 80 ODIs and they already look pretty state of the art. Second, success can simply be a matter of picking the best players and giving them the right tweaks, the right attitude, the right level of tactical intensity. And finally one-day cricket is alive and well, a richly textured short form, still evolving, still finding new forms; and still able to captivate and entertain and provide, as it has this summer, some genuinely beguiling cricketers.
• This is an extract taken from The Spin, the Guardian’s weekly cricket email. To subscribe, just visit this page and follow the instructions.
