Saturday column: Messy England are in dire need of sharp focus

When England take to the field at the Narendra Modi Stadium to face Australia on saturday morning, they will, as has been the case for the past four years, do so as ODI world champions.

But they will do so for only one week more. The pencils are already being sharpened for the post mortems and root-and-branch investigations which follow every English cricketing catastrophe after a disastrous defence of the world title they won so memorably in 2019.

England’s elimination has not quite been confirmed yet, but it would take an extraordinary set of results and Jos Buttler’s men to win their last three games – remember, they’ve won only one of their first six – to somehow save their bacon.

It is something of a full-circle moment for England’s white-ball team, whose previous nadir, at the 2015 World Cup, was so low that it prompted a shift in direction so seismic that four years later they reached the pinnacle of one-day cricket, an unthinkable scenario when they trudged off the Adelaide Oval after losing to Bangladesh in 2015.

That they have slumped to an arguably lower ebb but with a vastly superior side to the one who suffered that early exit eight years ago is even more galling.

Put simply, England have been a mess from start to finish – but their lack of clarity began even before they stepped on to the plane to India.

When chief selector Luke Wright announced England’s provisional 15-man squad for the World Cup in August, he intimated that there would be no changes barring injury. Only a few weeks later, however, captain Buttler hinted that wasn’t entirely the case when asked whether Test star Harry Brook, a surprising omission from the original squad, would be drafted into the side. Brook was eventually parachuted in (to the surprise of nobody) at the expense of opener Jason Roy 31 days on from Wright’s announcement.

Off-field indecisiveness has clouded judgement during the tournament, too.

The bizarre decision to announce the latest batch of upcoming central contracts midway through a major tournament and before a crunch game was unwise at best. But given that one member of the 15-man World Cup party, David Willey, wasn’t on the list of 29 players made the timing even less fathomable.

The chaos, perhaps understandably, has translated onto the pitch and things have gone from bad to worse to downright awful.

England slumped to their heaviest ODI defeat immediately after the central contracts debacle, and even when they got things right with a disciplined bowling display to restrict India to 229 last weekend, the lack of game awareness from their batters, ones who have taken white-ball cricket to new heights in the last eight years, was amateur at best.

Ben Stokes is rightly feted as an England great but, even in the era of Bazball, he can surely only have grimaced when watching back his dismissal to Mohammed Shami last weekend. That and Adil Rashid being run out at the non-striker’s end against Sri Lanka are two moments that have summed up England’s muddled mindset.

For many of the heroes of 2019, this year’s tournament will almost certainly be their last dance at a World Cup. The band is breaking up and another reset is required. 

It’s not complete doom and gloom – you only have to watch franchise cricket from every corner of the globe to see there is talent coming through. But a laser-like focus, one which Eoin Morgan applied the minute he left the Adelaide Oval eight years ago, is required if England are to be trendsetters, not bystanders, once more.

Sign up to emails from Racing Post Sport and get all the latest news and tips

Today's top sports betting stories

Follow us on Twitter @racingpostsport