England have gone from World Cup stragglers to the most exciting white-ball team around, and much of that is down to the captainEoin Morgan is a liar, a bluffer and an outsider. They are three of his greatest qualities. In the last three years Morgan has developed into a captain of rare brilliance, with a style that resembles the great Michael Vaughan. Both brought fresh eyes and independent thought to an apparently impossible challenge – beating Australia, in Vaughan’s case, and winning a World Cup in Morgan’s.Unlike Vaughan, Morgan has never really been taken to heart by the public. It’s hard to be certain what constitutes public opinion these days, but theere is a strong sense that plenty of England...
England’s ODI captain knows how important it is to separate the red and white ball portions of this tour before the series against AustraliaOn a Melbourne February morning in 2014, Eoin Morgan was perched on a bench outside the England team hotel nursing a coffee. He looked refreshed, though in that typical Morgan way, where gauging his mood would be a fool’s lot. Morgan sat, supped and watched the world go by while, within the walls behind him, English cricket was falling over itself.The night before, England were thumped by eight wickets in a Twenty20 at the MCG – the penultimate match of the 2013-14 tour that eventually saw them register only one competitive win (the fourth ODI at Perth)...
England’s one-day captain is happy to specialise in the limited-overs game but feels there must be a shift or the divide between the formats will become biggerEoin Morgan has given a few masterclasses this summer. There was his century against South Africa at Headingley, his 87 against Australia at Edgbaston and his 75 against Bangladesh at The Oval. Then there was the hour he spent at Aldersley leisure centre in Wolverhampton. You may have missed that one. It was during the finals of Chance to Shine’s street cricket competition, when the kids were taking a break from whacking tape balls around the indoor gym. One asked Morgan which was his favourite shot, another, a young Pakistan fan, what it felt...
Morgan’s bowling changes and attacking fields have England in a positive frame of mind in the Champions Trophy and almost everything has gone according to plan - so farIt would be daft to get too excited at England grabbing their semi-final slot days before anyone else. This does not guarantee a romp to the final and then the trophy. But the current climate makes a change to the agonising postmortems that accompanied England’s early flight home from the 2015 World Cup.The margin of New Zealand’s defeat in Cardiff – 87 runs – was misleading. After 30 overs of their run chase the Kiwis were 156 for two in pursuit of 311; Kane Williamson, after some early scares, was cruising with...
It is possible to argue England could have won every short‑form game before that final thrashing had they not been undone by a series of improbable eventsTake the positives out of that then. Better to burn out than fade away and England’s cricketers certainly ended their white‑ball tour of India in a shared magnesium flare at the M Chinnaswamy Stadium. The insistence on building towards the Champions Trophy in June has been so relentless it was tempting to ask Eoin Morgan afterwards what positives he would be taking, what lessons learnt, skill-sets executed from losing eight wickets for eight runs in 19 balls in Bengaluru – on the bare figures, England’s worst batting collapse in any kind of cricket.Except of course...