White Hot: The Inside Story of England Cricket’s Double World Champions

CONTENTS

Authors’ Note

1 Striving For Greatness

2 Fail Slow, Fail Often

3 A Golden Generation

4 The New England

5 New Horizons

6 Destigmatising Risk

7 Embracing Difference

8 Expecting To Win

9 England DNA

10 The Master

11 The Start Of Something

12 Flexible Players, Flexible Minds

13 The Perfect Game

14 A Tale Of Three Finals

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Index

Authors’ Note

On the east bank of Guyana’s Demerara River, England finally lost their status as a champion team. They spent five years as reigning world champions in at least one format, including 12 months where they were the first ever men’s team to hold both the 50-over and T20 titles simultaneously. But at a half-full Providence Stadium in June 2024, a semi-final thrashing inflicted by India knocked England out of the T20 World Cup and brought an era of dominance to a close.

The defeat confirmed what had become apparent many months earlier: England were no longer pre-eminent in international white-ball cricket. They were abject at the 50-over World Cup in India, winning only three of their nine games in an elongated group stage.

Their performance in the Caribbean was much more competitive, but a 68-run drubbing to the eventual champions highlighted England’s shortcomings. They were clinical in brushing smaller teams aside at the World Cup, but won only one of their four games against Test-playing opposition.

Few anticipated these successive failures. Ahead of the 50-over World Cup in India, ex-captain Eoin Morgan predicted that England would defend the title they had won under his leadership: ‘They have all bases covered: pace, spin, and they score a lot of runs very, very quickly.’ Morgan was mystified by what came next. ‘I’ve never come across a sports team that has underperformed like this England team, given the level of expectation,’ he said before a heavy defeat to India in Lucknow.

But the reaction to the subsequent disappointment in the Caribbean showed just how much England’s expectations had changed in white-ball cricket. ‘I don’t think it’s a bad sign when you get to a semi-final and you’re almost slightly disappointed with that,’ said Rob Key, their managing director. ‘I don’t think it’s any disgrace, really, to lose to India.’

After the 1992 World Cup final in Melbourne, England only reached the semi-finals of one more World Cup – the 2010 T20 World Cup, which they won – until 2016. From 2016 to 2024, they made the semi-finals in five World Cups out of six and reached the final three times, winning two of those. For the first time in England’s limited-overs history, only reaching the final four could be considered a failure.

The World Cups of 2023 and 2024 – 50-over and T20 respectively – marked the last gasp for what we have termed English cricket’s white-ball golden generation (see Chapter 3). This group included Jonny Bairstow, Jos Buttler, Alex Hales, Jason Roy, Joe Root, Ben Stokes, Chris Woakes and Mark Wood, all of whom were born from 1989-91. After 2015, this group formed the core of England’s white-ball sides. Now, England’s fortunes will be determined by a new generation.

It was a sad epitaph for England’s finest-ever limited-overs side. In retrospect, it can be said that, as with many golden generations across sports, England’s great side sowed the seeds of their own downfall. Their sustained excellence meant that the side aged together; the team’s management waited too long to reinvigorate them and talented young players found their opportunities limited.

These failings were embodied by the loss against Sri Lanka in Bangalore, which effectively confirmed England’s elimination from the 2023 ODI World Cup. Knowing that only a win would keep them in realistic contention for the semi-finals, England backed their veterans and picked a team in which Liam Livingstone, aged 30, was the youngest player. They were bowled out for 156 – an innings marked by tentativeness and indecision, embodied by Root’s calamitous run-out – and were thrashed by eight wickets.

Yet, while England failed to regenerate the 50-over team, their management could justifiably claim that their attempts to do so had been hindered by administrators. In the four years between the 2015 and 2019 World Cups, England played 88 ODIs; from 2019–23, they played just 42. Ignoring the need to prepare for Indian conditions, they played only six ODIs in Asia between World Cups.

This marked decline in the volume of fixtures was broadly in line with global trends; a combination of the Covid-19 pandemic and the proliferation of T20 leagues meant that bilateral ODI cricket was squeezed. But where England had treated ODIs as a priority in the build-up to the 2019 World Cup, now they were emphatically relegated to the national side’s third format, behind Tests and T20s. In the six months from March to September 2023, England did not play a single ODI; they were then left with just one series at full strength, against New Zealand, before the World Cup.

Root suggested that England’s build-up to the World Cup felt ‘rushed’. Before that defeat to Sri Lanka, Root said, ‘There’s talk of whether this format is relevant anymore anyway, in international cricket.’ His words betrayed how, where once the World Cup was seen as the pinnacle for his generation, the defence of their crown felt like an afterthought.

Complacency permeated England’s thinking: a belief that the stellar credentials of their players would ensure that they could replicate their prior success. ‘We made the assumption that, even without playing lots of 50-over cricket, this is such a good team that it will just slip into old habits and we’ll be able to go out there and win,’ Key admitted during the 2023 World Cup. ‘I made the mistake of thinking that it will be all right when we get there.’

Despite playing under half as many ODI matches in the 2019–23 cycle compared to the 2015–19 one, England used more players – 44, compared to 34. The number was swelled by Covid — as outlined in Chapter 9 — but it also reflected how the few ODIs that England played were seen as an opportune moment to rest multi-format stars, or to experiment.

The man who won the most ODI caps in the 2019–23 cycle, Roy, then lost form and was dropped just prior to the tournament anyway: he was the only player who featured regularly enough for his decline to become apparent. When it came to selection for the World Cup in India, England ‘knew we were guessing a little bit,’ head coach Matthew Mott conceded during the tournament.

This feeling bled into the World Cup itself. Where once England had been renowned for continuity of selection, which enabled players to bat in a more aggressive way, now their line-up veered chaotically from game to game. England started the World Cup embracing all-rounders, yet abandoned the tactic by their fourth game, when they were pummelled by South Africa in roasting heat in Mumbai: David Willey batted as high as No. 7 for only the third time in his eight-year ODI career. In the next game, against Sri Lanka, England resorted back to their all-rounder-heavy side. In place of the coherent identity that long characterised England’s line-up, now there was a sense of chaos.

The marginalisation of the domestic one-day tournament was emblematic of England’s priorities. The summer of 2019 was the last occasion that the One-Day Cup featured full-strength teams. Since the Hundred was launched – which was planned for 2020, but delayed until 2021 due to the pandemic – the One-Day Cup has been played simultaneously, effectively by county second elevens.

The upshot was that England’s younger generation scarcely played one-day cricket. Remarkably, from May 2019 until January 2023, when he made his one-day international debut, the prodigious Harry Brook did not play a single 50-over game. During the World Cup, Brook admitted that he was still trying to ‘figure out the format’: a stark contrast with the well-grooved batting line-up England built in the run-up to the 2019 World Cup.

Yet, even so, there was little to account for how Buttler mustered just 138 runs at an average of 15.33 in India. Buttler’s returns were only slightly better during the T20 World Cup in the Caribbean, where his only half-century came against the United States.

As we outline in Chapter 12, England were once at the forefront of cricket’s data revolution. But after their triumph at the T20 World Cup in Australia, Buttler mothballed the coded signals that had informed Morgan’s decision-making, instead opting to rely much more on his gut feeling. The less he used data, the more his ability to react to events on field came under scrutiny.

In a group-stage game against Australia, he gave the second over to Will Jacks, a part-time offspinner, with a wind blowing towards a short leg-side boundary for the left-handed openers, David Warner and Travis Head. It cost 22 runs, and Jacks didn’t bowl again at the tournament. On the eve of the semi-final at Guyana, England acknowledged that Providence Stadium was a ‘unique’ venue characterised by its low bounce, with spinners accounting for 50 per cent of the overs bowled there in T20 cricket. Buttler picked four seamers regardless, who conceded 120 runs in 12 overs between them; even as England’s two spinners conceded just 49 from eight overs, Moeen Ali was not given a single over.

India exploited England’s folly; two days later, they beat South Africa in Barbados to win their first world title, in either format, for 13 years. Captain Rohit Sharma, his predecessor Virat Kohli and their linchpin all-rounder Ravindra Jadeja all promptly retired from T20 internationals, realising they had nothing more to achieve in the format. But, even with a fraction of India’s playing pool and resources, England had managed not just to win the T20 World Cup, but the 50-over World Cup too.

England’s failures to defend their crowns only highlighted their achievements from 2015–22. It was a period in which, as even Australia’s captain Aaron Finch magnanimously said after the 2022 T20 World Cup, England became ‘the benchmark’ in white-ball cricket – words that could not be said of any previous England limited-overs side.

White Hot tells the story of England’s transformation from also-rans to front-runners, culminating in them becoming the first team to hold both men’s World Cups simultaneously on a heady night in Melbourne. Whatever comes next, that achievement will endure.

Tim Wigmore and Matt Roller,

July 2024

1

Striving For Greatness

‘Nobody has ever done it before. That will go down in the history books now, forever.’

Adil Rashid

In English men’s sport, winning normally means you’re about to lose.

After England won the 1966 Football World Cup, they lost in the quarter-finals in 1970 – and then failed to qualify for the next two World Cups at all. After England’s inaugural Rugby World Cup triumph in 2003, they lost 10 of their next 20 Six Nations matches. And so, in the afterglow of England’s intoxicating victory in the 2019 Cricket World Cup final, one question remained. Would another English sporting team disintegrate after reaching a peak? Or would this time be different?

Five miles south of Lord’s and 14 years earlier, The Oval had witnessed another moment of English sporting immortality, when England regained the Ashes after 16 years. It sparked hope that England could emulate Australia in building a great team that would dominate the game for years. Instead, England lost their next series, to Pakistan, and were whitewashed 5–0 in the return Ashes 16 months later.

Andrew Strauss, a leading player in 2005 and later England’s captain, then managing director, had a nagging fear that England’s class of 2019 could swiftly fade too. ‘I had cautionary feelings about what happened after the 2005 Ashes,’ Strauss recalls. ‘We let it all get to our heads. I think we thought the journey was done.’

For English cricket, winning their first 50-over World Cup was a remarkable achievement. But in a global sense, the achievement was less striking: England had merely become the third consecutive team to win an ODI World Cup at home, following India in 2011 and Australia in 2015. England would need to do altogether more if they wanted to do full justice to their talents.

It was a point that England recognised. A few months after the World Cup, Mo Bobat, England’s performance director, told Ed Smith, the national selector, ‘for a team that's as good as we are, we've still only won one World Cup.’ Smith recalls: ‘There was a sense that, given everything – the quality of the players, the culture and the leadership – there could be more. Maybe that was part of the un-Englishness of it all; it just didn't feel like 2019 was anywhere near the end of the story.’

England’s players felt the same way. After they lost to New Zealand in the semi-final of the T20 World Cup in 2021, the next global event after the 2019 World Cup, England lamented a missed opportunity.

‘For us to call ourselves a great side, we knew we had to win trophies,’ says the all-rounder Moeen Ali, a constant in England’s limited-overs squads since 2014. ‘We should probably have won that T20 World Cup,’ reflects the fast bowler Mark Wood. ‘That semi-final came as a bit of a shock.’ Moeen believes that, after demolishing them in the group stages, England ‘would have smashed Australia in the final’ had they made it. Their disappointment reflected the maturation of the T20 World Cup: the tournament had once been derided as a gimmick but was now considered almost as prestigious as the 50-over World Cup.

Before the semi-final of the next T20 World Cup, the 2022 edition Down Under, Moeen said that England needed more silverware to make the leap from being a great English team to simply a great team. ‘We’ve only won one tournament and it’s important we start winning more,’ he said. ‘If we’re going to be a great side we need to win more trophies. And when I look back I want to say: Yes, I was part of a great side.’

Jos Buttler thought similarly. ‘We certainly don’t want to be a team that just says we played a great style of cricket,’ Buttler, England’s captain and the leading white-ball batter of his generation, declared on the eve of the semi-final against India. ‘You want to have tangible things that you have achieved throughout that, as well.’ Four days later, England were the first men’s team to hold both World Cups simultaneously. As Eoin Morgan and Buttler – World Cup-winning captains past and present – embraced on the outfield at the MCG, it represented the fulfilment of an audacious plan hatched seven years previously.

From England’s nadir of being bundled out of the 2015 ODI World Cup by Bangladesh before the quarter-finals, Morgan instigated a rare transformation – one of both style and results. England have gone from playing staid, risk-averse cricket – or, at least, what they considered risk-averse – to a dynamic, buccaneering style that has set the standard for the white-ball game. And England went from playing a losing game – they didn’t win a single knockout game in the ODI World Cup from 1996–2015 – to a winning one. From 2016, England were the only nation in the world to reach five consecutive semi-finals in global events – and they won two World Cups.

As this book details, England’s journey is the story of brilliant cricketers, strategy, leadership – and luck. After 2015, English cricket embraced the white-ball game like never before. Normally it would take years for such a focus to be reflected in the results of the national team. England were different – and this is where the luck came in.

Through a combination of the onset of T20, the unintended benefits of structural changes to the domestic game and simple good fortune, England already had a golden generation of white-ball talent. It was just waiting to be unleashed.

This was achieved, as we shall explore, through embracing new horizons, learning from elsewhere – both around the cricket world and from other sports – and ending England’s historic insularity. It was achieved through a culture designed to encourage players to take risks, creating a system that liberated players to play without inhibitions in the greatest cathedrals of the sport.

It was achieved through embracing difference, building a team that was a blend of disparate talents, rather than England’s traditional array of orthodox bowlers. And it was achieved through establishing an England DNA in white-ball cricket, which seeped down well below the national team. Never again would England revert to their staid old ways.

In the years ahead, England would go from laggards to the very cutting edge of white-ball cricket. Whether through the magisterial skills of Buttler, their pioneering use of data and tactical flexibility, or their sheer abundance of batting prowess, England would become the white-ball game’s innovators, setting the standard for others to follow. Just ask Aaron Finch. ‘You’ve been the benchmark of white-ball cricket [for] a long time now,’ Finch wrote after England won the T20 World Cup; quite an admission from an Australian captain.

‘From 2015 until now, as a team, we have played a big part in changing how people play around the world,’ says Adil Rashid, the leg-spinner who returned to England’s squad after the 2015 World Cup. ‘Look around the world: teams are being more attacking, more aggressive. We definitely put that in people’s minds.’

White Hot explores one of the most stunning transformations, in culture and results, in modern British sport. Previous English cricket teams have seldom been able to withstand injuries to a couple of leading players. But England’s depth and style in white-ball cricket have become ‘ingrained’, in Buttler’s words. Even with five first-choice players out with injury in 2022, England’s identity was unaffected.

So were their results. Indeed, England produced one of the most stunning performances in white-ball history – thrashing India’s galácticos by ten wickets, with four overs to spare – in Adelaide. Then, they disposed of Pakistan at the Melbourne Cricket Ground too. Missing half their side, England were still comfortably better than anyone else.

And so this English team would be different. The 2019 World Cup final would remain one of the most cherished moments in English sport – but it would be elevated further by the years that followed. For that magical evening at Lord’s wasn’t just an iconic moment of English sporting history. It would also be the prelude to England achieving a momentous feat in global cricketing history: becoming the first men’s team to hold the ODI and T20 World Cups at the same time. Rashid reflects:

Nobody has ever done it before. That will go down in the history books now, forever.

It’s something I will cherish – not just for myself but for the whole squad for both the 50-over and 20-over World Cups. It’s something which, when I retire and look back at my career, will never be taken away from me. I can say I was a two-time World Cup champion. Some people can say ‘I won a World Cup’ but not many can say they’ve done it two times.

In 2019, England scaled their Mount Olympus – then, they set about finding another peak. Three years later in Australia, they climbed that one, too. This is the story of how England became white hot.

2

Fail Slow, Fail Often

‘There was a lack of thought, followed by overthinking.’

Nick Knight

Thirty years before England made history against them at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, Pakistan started the long cycle of English one-day decline. As floodlights illuminated a World Cup final for the first time, 87,182 captivated fans watched on at the MCG. To win the 1992 World Cup, England needed 109 from the last 14.2 overs – a required rate of under eight runs per over, which seemed manageable with six wickets still in hand.

Imran Khan summoned Wasim Akram – who combined pace, reverse swing and a left-arm angle – back into the attack to break England’s fifth-wicket partnership. With the fifth delivery of his comeback over, Akram curved a ball into Allan Lamb, which then seamed away late to uproot his off stump. The next ball hooped back into Chris Lewis, almost defying geometry as it flicked his bat’s inside edge and thudded into the stumps. England lost by 22 runs.

At this point, one story ends, and another begins. After the men’s World Cup began in 1975, England were consistently good, even if never great. They reached three of the first five World Cup finals, against West Indies at Lord’s in 1979, Australia at Eden Gardens in 1987 and then Pakistan at the MCG in 1992 – but lost them all.

For 23 years after Akram’s intervention, greatness continued to elude England – but they could seldom be called good, either. In the 1992 World Cup, England beat six Test-playing opponents in a month. Across the next 23 years, they played 26 fixtures against Test-playing opposition at World Cups; they won only seven.

* * *

For much of their troubled one-day international history, England didn’t even play by the same rules as the rest of the world. Instead, England had their own unique form of ODI cricket. Even the colour of the ball was different. From 1992, all World Cups were played in coloured clothing with a white ball. But in England, all ODIs were played with a red ball until 1998.

One-day cricket in England was played at a different pace – literally. From 1987, all World Cups and global ODI tournaments were 50 overs a side; until 1996, England’s home ODIs were 55 overs a side. Rather than simply one break between innings, England found time for lunch and tea – just like in a Test match. Outside England, no other nation staged an ODI lasting more than 50 overs after 1979.

As if playing with a different ball, and over a different length, was not enough, England’s home ODIs also differed from the normal rules in other ways. Until 1996, they did not have fielding restrictions at the start of the innings, giving teams little incentive to attack against the new ball – the strategy Sanath Jayasuriya and Romesh Kaluwitharana adopted as Sri Lanka won the 1996 World Cup.

All the quirks of English ODI cricket changed the game in the same essential way. They encouraged players to bat more conservatively and place a greater premium on their wicket: in other words, batting more like