One-Day Revival Can Take Pressure Off Suits

The Champions Trophy next June will be England’s main white-ball focus for the medium term, but they could do with gaining victory in India first, if only to take the heat off Andrew Strauss, the selectors and the coaching team of Trevor Bayliss and Paul Farbrace.

The management team work across both England’s red and white-ball cricket. In the past, Test results have usually kept spirits buoyant while the one-day team has been caned. But with Alastair Cook’s team losing seven of their last 11 Tests – four of them in India before Christmas – it will be up to the white-ball side to salvage both some pride and some faith from a series in which the decision-making often descended into chaos.

As team director, Strauss has already come under pressure for allowing Eoin Morgan, England’s white-ball captain, and Alex Hales, to miss the Bangladesh leg without consequence, due to their own safety and security fears. He probably feels it was a nice adult way to deal with the situation, but human nature being what it is, I’m pretty sure most of the players who trusted their security officer’s judgment and went to Bangladesh don’t share his view, whatever their public utterances to the contrary. I know I could never again admire a captain who withdrew while his team, subject to the same pressures, ventured on without him.

What Strauss should have done is tell Morgan and Hales to have the winter off to consider their futures, handed the captaincy for this one-day series to Joe Root to see how he handled it with the Test job in the offing, and let Ben Duckett get some of the frustration out of his system by clobbering India’s spinners without men crowding around the bat.