It’s hard to overstate just how bad England were away from home in one-day cricket through much of the Nineties. From the end of the 1992 World Cup, a tournament Graham Gooch’s side came mightily close to winning, up until the winter of 1997, England won just 16 of 62 matches overseas, losing four bilateral series (including 6-1 and 3-0 thrashings in South Africa and Zimbabwe respectively) and drawing two.

In the 1994/95 B&H World Series they were not only soundly beaten by hosts Australia, but by Australia’s second string too, and they could only muster two victories at the 1996 World Cup in Asia, against UAE and the Netherlands.

Sticking rigidly to a formula which generally served them well at home was partly to blame, as was a tendency to field the Test team in the shorter format while touring overseas, however poorly suited the players were to it.

“For years, England selectors had failed to recognise that one-day international cricket was no longer just a novelty, money-spinning adjunct to Test matches, but a parallel branch of the game deserving of full and separate attention,” wrote Mike Selvey in Wisden.

And so when the ECB accepted an invitation to the Emirati desert in the winter of 1997 to take part in the Akai Singer Champions Trophy – a four-team round-robin tournament also featuring Pakistan, India and West Indies – David Graveney, England’s chairman of selectors, finally decided to tear up the well-worn manual.

With Mike Atherton sitting out the trip after a long Ashes summer, Adam Hollioake, Surrey’s fearless and inventive young skipper, stepped in as caretaker captain, and there were maiden call-ups for Warwickshire’s Dougie Brown and Kent’s Matthew Fleming, two all-rounders who’d cut their teeth over many seasons on the county circuit. There was also a recall for Ali Brown, a hard-hitting opener at Surrey who bizarrely hadn’t featured since scoring an ODI century against India a year earlier. And Dean Headley would lead the attack in the absence of Darren Gough, who opted to skip the tournament.

“They wanted to try one-day ‘specialist’ cricketers,” recalls David Lloyd, England’s coach at the time. “At the instigation of David Graveney, we selected these players who in some quarters would be labelled ‘bits-and-pieces’ cricketers, but as far as we were concerned they’d have an influence on three aspects of the game. Hollioake was a terrific appointment. Brilliant lad, up and at ’em, innovative. And without a doubt the lads played for him. In my opinion he was the first instigator, certainly for England, of no-fear cricket: it doesn’t matter if you get out, as long as you’re trying to do the right thing and push on.”

For Hollioake, who’d been named Player of the Series in England’s one-day clean sweep of Australia that summer but only had five ODI caps when he was given the captaincy, it was a case of keeping Atherton’s seat warm for him. “I saw it as a temporary position,” he tells Wisden.com. “It was always understood that Athers was the captain, I was just doing the job while he took a few weeks off. They weren’t expecting us to do very well, and no one expected us to win, probably including me.”

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The ECB had previously been reluctant to play in Sharjah due to rumours of match-fixing at the venue, and Hollioake had barely started in his new role when he was contacted by a bookmaker.

“Match-fixing was a pretty big topic inside cricket at the time and we were told before we went out there that there was a chance we’d get approached. I’d literally been in my hotel room for half an hour when someone messaged me asking for information on the teams and the pitch. I told him he had to go through the normal channels and book an interview. He said, ‘I’m a bookmaker and I’ll pay you money’. I was like, ‘Mate, it’s my first game as captain of England, you’ve got the wrong guy!’ I reported it to David Graveney and the ICC.”

The tour came to what felt like a natural conclusion when Hollioake was placed on a conveyor belt and posted through the x-ray machine at the airport. “There were some very surprised people at customs,” says Fleming.

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In the wake of that unlikely triumph, the ECB took the unprecedented step of splitting the captaincy, giving Hollioake the one-day leadership on a permanent basis. But the Sharjah victory was not a harbinger of better things to come.

England won just nine of their next 28 ODIs heading into the 1999 World Cup on home soil, and Hollioake was replaced as skipper by Stewart a few months out from competition – which the hosts infamously exited before the official song had even been released.

Of the 11 players who featured in Sharjah, four weren’t selected for the World Cup a year-and-a-half later, with Fleming and Dougie Brown, so influential in that win, playing only a handful more matches between them.

So did England depart too quickly from that winning formula, or was it always destined to be a glorious one-off?

“It’s easy to say they should have played the side which won out there,” says Hollioake, “but it was a very different game [in England], with different tactics and people required. The conditions – with a Duke ball on early-season wickets – were the complete opposite to Sharjah, so to think that we’d have been able to take that side to the World Cup in 1999 is naïve. It wouldn’t have worked. But I still feel that there were a number of people from that side who might have been given a couple more opportunities.”

Fleming concedes that while some of the personnel may have needed to change, England’s selectors missed a trick by not embracing the team spirit which had developed in Sharjah.

“When England selected a team for the 1999 World Cup, they completely failed to understand why we had done well in Sharjah. I was pissed off that I wasn’t in that squad, but I could understand it. I was more pissed off that they had dismantled the characteristic of that squad.

“I don’t think the selectors realised what a key part of the winning formula the character within that team was, and I think they got rid of too many of the genuinely selfless characters. People like Dougie Brown – who were enthusiastic and really pleased for you if you did well. They had quite a lot of introverts in 1999, when there was real pressure playing at home, and no one to release that pressure. The whole thing was based on fear, rather than imagination and courage.”

At the turn of the century, Sharjah was also left in the shade, the stadium blacklisted by India due to the match-fixing allegations that continued to swirl around it. Having hosted nearly 200 ODIs between 1984 and 2003, it lay dormant as an international venue for seven years. Rehabilitated in recent years, Sharjah is now the toast of the IPL, England’s have-a-go heroes of ’97 a distant memory.