Ben Duckett believes England’s troubled tour of India will be immediately forgotten if they can rediscover their white-ball mojo and win the Champions Trophy this month.
In comments that say plenty about the state of the modern game, the bullish opener even went as far as saying he and his team-mates “don’t care” if they lose the third ODI to India “as long as we beat them in the final of the Champions Trophy”. Defeat in Ahmedabad would condemn England to a record of played eight, lost seven on a tour in which they have been utterly outclassed.
“We are playing one of the best sides in the world in their conditions and we are quite a new group under Baz [Brendon McCullum, the coach],” he said. “We have come here for one thing, and that is to win the Champions Trophy. We still believe we can do that, certain players are finding their feet and some form.
“We have been close against this India side and we have been nowhere near our best. We could dwell and start meetings and going at each other, but the group under Baz aren’t going to do that.
Antipathy towards side threatens to turn into apathy
“I don’t mean it as a cop-out when I say we are looking ahead to the Champions Trophy. If we go back in the dressing room and point fingers at each other and are individually critical, that is not a great going into a massive competition. This is a massive series but the Champions Trophy is the big competition. If we lose 3-0 to India, I don’t care as long as we beat them in the final of the Champions Trophy. We probably won’t look back on this if we do the business in that competition.”
As spectators, comments like these can make for galling reading. A few hundred hardy English fans have travelled to watch this tour, drowned amid the thousands of blue India shirts at each game. Many more are watching and following from home, desperate to see England’s once mighty white-ball teams win again. Their form is so poor that antipathy is threatening to turn into apathy in some quarters. If the England team see this tour as a mere warm-up for the bigger event that follows, why should they care?
Alas, Duckett has his priorities straight. Bilateral cricket, especially white-ball, is on an inexorable slide. Broadcasters are losing interest, preferring instead wallpaper T20 tournaments that provide daily content in bitesize chunks, year round. As interest wanes in international T20, so does the value of broadcast rights deals. Cash-hungry boards will follow the money. But they only have themselves to blame; a noble attempt to provide ODI context, the Super League qualification system for World Cups, was shelved after just one cycle in 2023.
Now, it is all about major tournaments, for which the International Cricket Council has an enormous rights deal. There is effectively one every year, in each of the men’s and women’s games, and that is what teams are judged on. England are no different. If they win the Champions Trophy in Pakistan and the UAE, we will reflect that the McCullum era is off to a good start, even though this tour has been gruesome.
The Champions Trophy, a tournament not seen since 2017, is not on par with a World Cup, but it is high stakes and cut-throat. Winning it would be enough to put a poor run behind England. They have lost four ODI series in a row now. Before that came perhaps the limpest World Cup defence in cricket history, where they needed to win their last two games to finish just to qualify for the Champions Trophy. With four wins from 13 matches, their form since the World Cup has actually worsened.
Since the retirement of totemic captain Eoin Morgan in June 2022, England have won just 16 and lost 25 of their 43 ODIs. That gives them the third-worst win-loss ratio (0.64) of full member nations, better only than Zimbabwe and Ireland. A once mighty empire has crumbled.
No excuses for full-strength squad
They are battling two significant structural issues: young players have played little 50-over cricket because the domestic competition clashes with the Hundred. And senior players have played little ODI cricket because their schedule is so brutal that they have had to be siloed into either white or red-ball cricket. As director of cricket, Rob Key has chosen to prioritise Tests, seeing it as the bellwether format.
Really, though, England have no excuse for not performing well at the Champions Trophy. They have a full-strength squad (only Ben Stokes, whose white-ball future is questionable anyway, is missing from a first XI), packed with talent, and have had a month of preparation together. They should be a match for anyone.
Duckett is right that their travails in India will be forgotten with victory in Pakistan. The trouble is, even in a format that can change rapidly, they look the opposite of primed and ready.
