England white-ball captain Eoin Morgan says the “door is still open” for Alex Hales to return to the national setup by the time the T20 World Cup kicks off in October.

Hales hasn’t played for England since March 2019, with the hard-hitting top-order batsman axed from England’s Cricket World Cup squad after it was found he had received a three-week ban from the ECB for failing a second drugs test.

Hales has previously said he is targeting the 2020 T20 World Cup for a potential return, but Morgan has said that the right-hander would need to rebuild trust between himself and the England team before doing so.

When asked what it would take to rebuild that trust, and whether a return would be possible ahead of the T20 World Cup, Morgan said it was impossible to say exactly how long the process would take, but that the “door is still” open for it to happen.

“In terms of what that looks like, practically, it’s human nature, it’s about developing trust,” he said. “I don’t think you can put a time limit on gaining back that trust, and that’s not just with me, that’s with every member of the squad, the backroom staff, the selectors.

“And that does take time. We’re in May, so it’s 11 months ago that the incident happened with Alex, so it’s actually not that long ago that it happened, and what happened was actually quite considerably harmful to the environment, which obviously led to the breakdown in trust between Alex and our players, so to say, how long that will take to regain, we don’t know, but certainly the door is still open for that trust to be built back up.”

Eoin Morgan was speaking as part of the date announcement for the 2020 Aldar Properties Abu Dhabi T10, scheduled for 19 – 28 November at Zayed Cricket Stadium, Abu Dhabi