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

By Tim Wigmore and Matt Roller

SHORTLISTED FOR THE SPORTS BOOK AWARDS 2024 – CRICKET BOOK OF THE YEAR
SHORTLISTED FOR THE CRICKET SOCIETY AND MCC BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2024

'The gripping story of England's transformation from prissy blockers to double world champions'
The Times

'A must-read for any cricket lover'
Nasser Hussain, Former England captain and Sky Sports commentator

The inside story of how England became the first men's team to hold both of cricket's World Cups simultaneously, from the players and key people involved.

When England lifted the T20 World Cup in November 2022, they became the first ever men's team to be One-Day International and Twenty20 world champions simultaneously. In English sport, triumphs aren't just rare – they also tend to be followed by a collapse. England's white-ball cricket side was different: a team that followed scaling the summit by doing so again. They became, as Australia's captain put it, “the benchmark” for the rest of the world.

White Hot tells the full story of how England built one of the most extraordinary sides ever seen in limited-overs cricket. First in 2019 and then in 2022, they produced a series of mesmerising performances to win two World Cups. It is a story of the vision and strategy that underpinned England's transformation from white-ball stragglers into a side at the very cutting edge of their sport. It is a story of a golden generation, and the development of a system that passed on those values to the players that came next. And it is a story of how a conservative sporting culture shed its inhibitions to become a hub of innovation where players were free to be aggressive - even in the most important games.

Featuring exclusive interviews with players at the heart of the 2019 World Cup win, including Joe Root and Jason Roy; the 2022 World Cup victory, like Harry Brook, Sam Curran and Alex Hales; and double world champions including Moeen Ali, Adil Rashid, Chris Woakes and Mark Wood. With insight from coaches and administrators, including Trevor Bayliss, Rob Key, Matthew Mott and Andrew Strauss, it reveals how England changed their culture, attitude to unorthodoxy and approach to risk forever.

White Hot examines this incredible journey in forensic detail. This is captivating reading for cricket fans - and anyone who wants to understand how a floundering team can become record-breakers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Jun 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9781399411622

Tim Wigmore

Tim Wigmore is the author of Cricket 2.0: Inside the T20 Revolution, which won the Wisden Book of the Year and Telegraph Cricket Book of the Year awards in 2020. He is a sports writer for The Daily Telegraph, and has also written regularly for The New York Times, The Economist, the New Statesman and ESPNCricinfo.

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CONTENTS

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

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 they would in a Test match. ‘Jayasuriya and all those guys – who were brilliant players – were playing on flat wickets and smashing it everywhere,’ recalls Nick Knight, who played 100 ODIs from 1996 to 2003. ‘They were effectively playing a different form of the game. We were playing for survival.’

England’s ODI performances could essentially be explained by a simple rule: the further removed the format became from Test cricket, the worse they performed. For most of the 1990s, England were outstanding in ODIs at home. Under Michael Atherton’s captaincy, England won 12 home ODIs and lost just two, winning all six of their series – including whitewashing Australia 3–0 in 1997. Nine of these 14 games were played in May – and all of them with a red ball.

This record shows that England’s problem was not a lack of talent. Instead, their players fell victim to a system that simply did not allow England a reasonable chance to compete in World Cups. Between the 1992 and 1999 World Cups, England won 18 home ODIs and lost ten – a win–loss ratio of 1.8, above even Australia. But overseas – when forced to play by everyone else’s rules – England lost 40 ODIs and won just 23.

It was not just that England’s home ODIs didn’t resemble the version played in the rest of the world; England also simply didn’t play enough. Between the 1992 and 2003 World Cups, the other seven main Test nations each played at least 227 ODIs – the equivalent of 20 a year. Even Zimbabwe contested 202. But England played only 163, impervious to the greater focus on the ODI game in the rest of the cricket world. After reaching the 1992 World Cup final, this was England’s lost decade. It would take more than another decade to recover.

* * *

After being marmalised by Sri Lanka in the 1996 World Cup, England attempted to find their own Jayasuriya or Kaluwitharana. First, they selected Surrey’s Alistair Brown, who was deployed as a pinch-hitter. Then, despite Brown hitting a century in his third ODI, they replaced him with Knight – another attacking opener, though a little more restrained. Knight scored hundreds in both his second and third ODIs against a Pakistan attack which included Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis and Saqlain Mushtaq.

A year later, in December 1997, England played a rare standalone one-day competition: the Akai Singer Champions Trophy in Sharjah. For once, the selectors were unencumbered by the need to pick Test players; Atherton, along with star fast bowlers Darren Gough and Andy Caddick, was rested. In their place, Adam Hollioake led a side of one-day specialists to victory, beating India, Pakistan and West Indies. Hollioake’s mantra was that the side should have fun: team physio Wayne Morton played the guitar while the squad sang Wonderwall.

Until 2019, this remained England’s lone victory in an ODI tournament featuring more than three sides. Hollioake was appointed permanent one-day captain as a result. ‘I loved playing under him,’ Knight says. ‘He was a breath of fresh air. The environment he created around the dressing-room was very refreshing.’ But after presiding over a 4–1 defeat in West Indies and a 2–1 loss to South Africa, Hollioake lost the job. With it went all notions that Hollioake could transform England as he had Surrey.

‘He fell foul of the system,’ Knight reflects. ‘That was an opportunity to really build on what we'd achieved, but that was the cycle we were going through during the whole of my time in one-day cricket: there was confusion, constantly, about whether we should pick one-day specialists or Test cricketers. There was no continuity at all: we were very rarely a team because we didn't know who was playing next to us on any given day.’

At home, England tended to select cautious batters with long-format skills, or seam bowlers suited to English conditions. The policy, of course, worked in England. But such a strategy was far less suited to playing overseas.

Perversely, it was even harder for limited-overs specialists to get into England’s team abroad than at home. After taking eight wickets in his first two ODIs against Pakistan in 1996, Hollioake was omitted from England’s winter ODIs: not because the selectors thought they were better off without him, but to save on the airfare. ‘There wasn’t enough money to have specialist ODI players coming out, so you just stuck with the Test players,’ Atherton explained in the book 28 Days’ Data.

Hollioake, born and raised in Australia, was baffled by England’s Luddite approach. ‘If you’re a Test cricketer with a game based on concentration, that doesn’t guarantee you are going to be a good one-day cricketer,’ he told The Times in 2015. ‘But it’s amazing how often people take offence when you make that point.’

Despite sporadic attempts to embrace limited-overs cricket as a distinct format, England’s reflex remained to default to Test-match thinking. Between the 1996 and 1999 World Cups, Knight was England’s leading ODI run-scorer, averaging 39.51 with a strike-rate of 72 – fairly brisk by the standards of the time. ‘After his captain Alec Stewart, Knight's is the first name on the teamsheet when it comes to putting the opposition to the sword and dealing the first blow,’ The Cricketer magazine wrote on the eve of the 1999 World Cup; Knight was signed up by The Times as their star columnist.

But the night before England’s first game of the tournament, Stewart knocked on the door of Nasser Hussain’s room at the Danubius Hotel, across the road from Lord’s. ‘He said: You’re opening the batting,’ Hussain recalls. ‘It was last-minute, it was haphazard: OK skip, I’ve not done that before but I’ll give it a go.’ Hussain – who had replaced the injured Atherton in the squad – had exclusively batted in the middle order in his ODI career, and lost his place after a tri-series against Australia and Sri Lanka three months earlier.

At the time, Hussain averaged just 23.86, with a funereal strike-rate of 61, in his ODI career. But he was the Test vice-captain, while Knight was increasingly seen as a one-day specialist; with the tournament starting in mid-May, the theory was that opening batters would need a tighter defensive technique than Knight’s. Being dropped was the lowest moment of Knight’s cricketing life:

The whole situation summed up the sense that ODI cricket was subservient to Test match cricket. There wasn't a lot of thought that went into ODI cricket until you got to a few months away from the World Cup. Then, we would overthink it. There was a lack of thought, followed by overthinking. I wasn’t in the best form in Australia and didn’t do particularly well in the warm-up games, but I look back at it now, and I think those involved in the decision-making would probably see it as a gamble, a panic.

The day before the game, Stewie came up to me and said, ‘Bad luck, mate.’ I have always had the utmost respect for him … but if I’m honest, I didn’t take it particularly well. I’d done the cycle, and felt that a World Cup in your own country, the chance to open up against Sri Lanka and not be there, walking out to the national anthem at a packed Lord’s … it was a huge down moment in my career.

Despite his inexperience as an opener, Hussain finished the World Cup as England’s leading scorer: he made 194 runs across five innings, averaging 64.66. The problem lay in his sluggish strike-rate of 59. Against Kenya and Zimbabwe, he made unbeaten half-centuries in run-chases that England cruised, winning by nine and seven wickets.

But even though net run-rate was the tie-breaker when teams finished level on points, Hussain gave no thought to acceleration: he took 127 balls for his unbeaten 88 against Kenya, and 93 balls over his 57 against Zimbabwe. While England’s wins were emphatic, they missed the chance to win with many more overs to spare and give their net run-rate a huge boost – despite Hollioake’s warnings.

After Zimbabwe’s surprise victory over South Africa and England’s collapse against India, England were eliminated on net run-rate. It was an apt summation of their travails in one-day cricket.

‘This team did not include the best one-day cricketers in England,’ Mark Nicholas wrote in The Daily Telegraph after their exit. ‘Again England have mistrusted natural talent and therefore excluded men such as Nick Knight, Chris Lewis and Dominic Cork, not to mention Mark Ramprakash and Ali Brown, who would offer class, if at times an uneven temperament, instead of the so-called reliability and commitment which are the strongest characteristics of more ordinary cricketers.’

It was not that the English system couldn’t produce one-day cricketers, but that the England set-up did not give them the platform to succeed.

That truth was plainly evident in the 2003 World Cup. With qualification for the Super Six stage on the line, England reduced Australia to 135 for eight in pursuit of 205. But Michael Bevan, a one-day specialist who had not played a Test for five years, put on an unbroken 70-run stand with tailender Andy Bichel to take Australia home.

‘That game showed where both sides were mentally, not talent-wise,’ Knight reflects. ‘They were the best side in the world: they knew that either a team had to play exceptionally well to beat them, or they had to play exceptionally badly to lose. In the end, the mental gap played out.’

England’s XI had an average of 62 ODI caps each; Australia’s 104. ‘We hadn’t been in those winning situations enough,’ Knight says. ‘There wasn’t a genuine self-belief that we could do it. All