Resurgent England Hitting Heady Heights

England will head to India in January with a rather different looking side to the one that has just beaten Bangladesh.

Joe Root walks in, so too Alex Hales, while Eoin Morgan will be back as captain. Jason Roy, who missed the final game with a quad injury, will return, and though Mark Wood has been ruled out, there are still options.

But that will most certainly not be a reflection of the side’s performance in Bangladesh, which ranks as a hugely impressive win by a group of players short on experience.

The emergence of Jake Ball, Ben Duckett and Sam Billings as quality operators, and Jos Buttler and Ben Stokes as leaders of real substance, made this a profitable tour, to the extent that assistant coach Paul Farbrace saw the absentees as a boon.

“There are huge positives,” he said. “In the end, it was probably a good thing that some didn’t come. When you think about it, in the third ODI four of the top six don’t regularly play, and chased down a very tricky score.

“We felt we were very capable of getting it, but it did take some decent batting to get there. To win, but win it with a few different players, as well as the off-field experience, that can only be good.”