Eoin Morgan will return to lead England in their 20-over and 50-over series against Australia despite playing no competitive cricket since August 1. Morgan, who is not centrally contracted, was given time off by Middlesex on the grounds that he was struggling for form and exhausted after being on the road virtually non-stop since last autumn.
England face Australia in a one-off Twenty20 in Cardiff a week Monday before playing five one-day internationals in 11 days, a compressed schedule designed to give the England players some sort of break before leaving for the United Arab Emirates on September 30.
It is a helter-skelter itinerary that provides further context to the decision to give the captain a rest, but also demands that the workloads of other players are assessed carefully when the selectors meet today to pick their squads. James Anderson and Stuart Broad look certain to be rested while Joe Root and Mark Wood may also be allowed to sit out at least a portion of the ODI series.
Morgan, who held preliminary discussions with the selectors during the build-up to the Oval Test and attended the first day of the game, played a major part in kick-starting England’s revival this summer. He encouraged them to play in an ultra-aggressive style in the ODIs against New Zealand and led by example, culminating in a hundred at Trent Bridge, but then failed to make a fifty in 14 innings for his county.
The ODI series opens in Southampton – one of Morgan’s happiest hunting grounds – before moving on to Lord’s and then north to Old Trafford (for two games) and Headingley. If the weather stays fair, there is no reason why scoring-rates should not rival the tempo of the New Zealand matches. England are committed to an attacking style and Australia did not win the World Cup by being defensive.
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Australia, who warm up with a short trip to Ireland this week, will be without several of those who helped lift the World Cup. Mitchell Johnson and Josh Hazlewood have been rested and James Faulkner is effectively under suspension for a drink-driving offence. They are also experimenting with a new one-day spinner in Ashton Agar.
England will toy with trying out a new (or nearly new) slow bowler themselves. Zafar Ansari, 23, the Surrey allrounder who bowls left-arm spin, is tipped for the tour of UAE as back-up in the Tests to Moeen Ali’s off-spin and the leg-spin of Adil Rashid, and the one-dayers would be a good chance to have a look at him before then. He was given an ODI debut against Ireland in May but rain denied him the opportunity to bat or bowl.
Since then, Ansari has taken rapid strides with Surrey, scoring 948 runs and taking 54 wickets in all competitions. He recently outbowled Monty Panesar in a championship match against Essex at Colchester in which he took eight wickets, and although he has been forced to sit out this weekend’s four-day game at Bristol with a hamstring injury, it is only a niggle.
“If you were building a model professional cricketer, he’d be it,” said Alec Stewart, Surrey’s director of cricket. “He’s still learning what he needs to do to be a spinner [in four-day cricket] but what’s good is that he works things out for himself. The UAE tour would not be too early for him.”
Jason Roy, Ansari’s Surrey teammate, failed to make a score of real substance against New Zealand but he helped Alex Hales give the innings an explosive start during the massive run-chase in Nottingham and plays the style of game England want to encourage.
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It is the pace resources that need careful management. Anderson has been bowling regularly in the nets at The Oval and is close to match fitness but there is no point risking further injury with a Test tour so close, while Broad deserves a rest after sending down 330.3 Test overs in four months. That leaves Wood, Steven Finn, Ben Stokes and David Willey to carry the load, possibly along with Chris Jordan, who has just returned from two months out with a side strain.
If England are to convince themselves they are making real progress in 50-over cricket, they will need to reverse a sorry sequence of results against Australia which has seen them beaten in nine of the past 10 meetings, the most recent of which was at the World Cup.
That defeat in Melbourne was a heavy one but some of the losses have been narrow and suggest a lack of belief has been as much the issue as anything. This was typified by an inability to close out a game in Brisbane early last year after Australia’s last-wicket pair came together with 57 needed. With Clint McKay for company, Faulkner won the game with 69 off 47 balls, which included five sixes off the bowling of Stokes.