England need to stick by Dawid Malan and Harry Brook despite an opening-day defeat to New Zealand, writes Phil Walker.

Dawid Malan doesn’t care much for music. Especially when he’s driving, any noise getting up in his thoughts makes him jittery. He prefers the quiet: all the better to think. Blocking out the din, muffling the voices, is a trick he’s had to learn to play on himself. Harry Brook isn’t so into silence, he’s more on the Elton-glasses-and-wellies, Afro-raving Baby Shark side of the dial. It’s all a question of tempo.

After one day of this World Cup, one day and one thrashing, the volume is cranking up. Not quite to 11, perhaps – it’s been a distinctly pianissimo drumroll to the resumption of this never-ending circus – but still, even on a Thursday, in a cavernous bowl three-quarters empty, Game 1 of 48, the noise is ramping up around the England team. Eoin Morgan was the first to go: too passive, not enough punches thrown. “They didn’t go hard enough,” he said at the break. Three hours later, they had given up 38 boundaries in 36 overs; Morgan is always there on the half-beat. England, suddenly, and we’ve barely taken our seats, need to play note-perfect cricket from here.

It was a strangely discordant innings. On the face of it, it felt like a reversion to the old ways, before they found their sound. Studious start, awkward setbacks, cautious rebuild, third-act wobble, lower-order bunts – massive defeat. Opening days, Joe Root later said, are often “cagey affairs”, and it’s not a bad summary of the output as a whole. Except that ‘caginess’ isn’t meant to be in this team’s vocabulary.

So here we are again, back at the old crossroads: bad ideas, or just bad batting? The temptation after a thwacking like this is to cleave to theories, to grasp at the overarching. The oldest squad in the comp? Loyalties stretched to a fault. Attack? Undercooked. Batting? Unsettled. Middle-order? Unreliable. From there it’s easy to run down the scorecard, constructing narratives as we go.

The pen swirls around the undroppables but lingers on Malan and Brook. The latter because he’s the last man in, and supposedly the first one out once Ben Stokes returns from what Buttler insists is a minor hip niggle. Notoriously, Brook wasn’t in the original 15-man squad, but his returns of 25, 2 and 10 in the three warm-up games presumably offered an irresistible case for inclusion ahead of Jason Roy, whose untimely back spasms – allied to Malan’s imperious form as an opener in last month’s New Zealand warm-ups – helped England form a case for his exclusion. Malan’s form and Brook’s versatility edged Roy out.

At the end of those ODIs Malan made an interesting observation. To stay in this team, he said, you’ve either got to be a genius or consistent. And he knows which camp he belongs to. His self-awareness, as befits a 36-year-old who by now has been dropped more than strictly necessary by England, is especially sharp. He knows who he is, and what he needs to do.

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The numbers, by any reasonable measure – five hundreds and a 96 from 22 ODIs, striking at 95 – should serve as soundproofing walls, his very own noise cancellations. Smallish sample size notwithstanding, the numbers are excellent. The point of difference he offers, as a left-hander with several gears, adds the promise of genuine value.

Malan deserves a good run as an opener in this team. His 14 (24) against New Zealand was less a failure of intent than one of those moments when a classy white-baller, in this case Matt Henry, gives his man the run-around. It happens. Any criticism of Malan’s maiden World Cup innings, in isolation, is off beam.

Still, for all Buttler’s attempts to move on from the past (“It’s irrelevant to me”), the ideals of 2019 continue to stalk this team, and any slight deviation from the purity of that vision risks looking like a partial climbdown. Thus, as Morgan casts down upon the latest scene, intoning them to go harder, go harder, and Roy’s ghost drifts across the square, Malan will hear the whispers, as he has done all his career, whether they are for him or not.

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It’s Brook, those hands, that grin, that untrammelled otherness, that is the real problem. Everywhere he goes, havoc follows. If his innings against New Zealand had lasted for another 17 minutes, he’d be a shoo-in for the rest of the tournament. The facts are that he hit five of his first 15 balls to the boundary and spooned his 16th up in the air. (The shot was absolutely on. His pull against the spinners is a devastating thing, and as with every signature move, sometimes it goes wrong. Even Viv got bowled round his legs.) He has to play.

The point is that this is England. Or at the very least, the England that we’ve come to expect, the England that sits as double world champions, eyes ablaze, screaming in the face of danger. The England of everyday outlandishness. Brook needs to play in this England. Malan too, for that matter. For now, an all-rounder can make way.

Game No.1 was an objective shocker. But it did offer one benefit to England: that of clearing up a few loose ends. Thus begins their tournament. Whatever they get, we’ll get one more.

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