What's gone wrong with England?

White-ball cricket has taken a sharp downturn

I’ve never been a buyer of the argument surrounding the extreme value of captaincy. In my experience in cricket, 5% are geniuses, 5% are terrible and 90% fall roughly in the middle. The work done by Jack Hope from The Cricket Podcast also has illustrated this - he ascertained MS Dhoni is worth around three extra runs as captain in the IPL.

If Dhoni is worth three runs, what are the rest of the captains worth? It can’t be any more than the captain who is renowned for being the best T20 captain of all time. Yet England, post Eoin Morgan, have endured a sharp downturn in their T20 results, which may well leave people thinking that Morgan’s departure has cost England in a big way.

I don’t believe it has - if it has had much impact, it’s one of a plethora of factors, and it’s interesting to contrast Morgan’s captaincy record with England and one season at KKR in 2021 to his captaincy record elsewhere. I won’t delve into the numbers here, but the words chalk and cheese spring to mind. I believe I know the reason for the contrast, but I’ll save that for a rainy day.

So if it’s not the departure of Morgan, what is it?

Firstly, England have had to adjust to a new coach as well as a new captain, and that upheaval probably doesn’t help although I’m unconvinced that ex-coach Chris Silverwood really drove the ship either. It really should have been business as usual despite the changes and any reinvention of the wheel from a strategic perspective (not selection - we will get onto that) wasn’t required. However, it’s worth making the point that this is one of the dangers of hiring an overseas coach - it’s unreasonable to expect them to have a detailed, immediate knowledge of the domestic player pool and I think that’s why we’ve not seen many changes from the established group.

Injuries among the bowling group have also cost England. Archer, Woakes and Wood are all out, so is Mahmood for the season and Tymal Mills has also had his injury issues too this year. If you take away the leading bowlers of any international team then there will be a downturn in expected performance, although it doesn’t help that England consistently ignore the talents of the likes of Benny Howell, who would have fitted perfectly into the team against South Africa - particularly given the middle overs issues England have endured.

I also believe that the age dynamic of the England white-ball squad is not helping either - was this a good time for a new coach or captain to take the job? I’m not so sure. Liam Livingstone was the youngest England player at the T20 World Cup at the end of 2021, currently aged 28. Only one other player - Tymal Mills - is currently aged below 30, and he turns 30 in a couple of weeks time.

Of the 13 players who played for England in that tournament, four are currently aged 34+, and nine aged 32+, so there’s something of the end of a golden generation feel to this England T20 squad, rather similar to what happened with English football around a decade ago which forced a rebuild.

Future planning and anticipating player age-related decline are a crucial aspect of roster construction, but I’m not sure England have done that. Understanding the age curve dynamic of players and anticipating decline is so critical that I’ll be doing a separate Substack on this soon.

My age curve analysis work suggests that the average player peaks between the ages of 28-31 (it’s slightly different for various formats and player roles, but it’s a good enough rule of thumb), so according to this, there are currently 9/13 players from that World Cup squad now past their peak. Morgan has now retired from international cricket, but there’s still eight remaining.

Enough with the discussion anyway, down to some numbers. Here is some basic analysis of how England have performed pre and post Morgan in T20 cricket at the time of writing.

First of all, batting. We can see that the drop off in batter strike rate has been coming for some time, in conjunction with balls per dismissal:-