Rashid, who is a regular in England’s white-ball teams but has seemingly been snubbed by the Test set-up, is understood to be seeking the freedom to play in franchise tournaments around the world, although while he has been successful in the Big Bash he missed out on IPL and PSL deals this year. He will spend the early part of the English summer trying to improve his skills for limited-overs cricket.

“I’ve said many times that the skills required for the three formats of the game are so different, so it is a challenge for players to play in all three – in international cricket you don’t have many players that do. This is the challenge that players and coaches face in domestic cricket. We need our players to be able to play in all three formats predominantly. You get the odd specialist, but county setups can’t accommodate specialists at this moment in time. Whether that will happen in the future, we’ll wait and see. We really need to get our players skilled up in all three formats. Adil obviously feels he can’t achieve that at the moment.”

Rashid has not played Test cricket since England’s last tour of India and was passed over in favour Mason Crane for the recent Ashes series in Australia. He took 10 wickets at 50 in the County Championship in 2017 and due to the amount of limited-overs cricket played by England, was frequently unavailable. At the age of 29 he now appears to have given up on red-ball cricket altogether, a significant development – and potentially disturbing one – for the game.