When England arrived back at their team hotel last night, after the reassuring dismantling of Bangladesh in Dharamshala, they were greeted with a cake for cutting in what is a familiar celebratory ritual among teams in the Indian Premier League.
Given he was frogmarched onto the scene by his captain, the day’s century-maker, Dawid Malan, did not seem overly keen, aware, probably, that the dessert would soon be being used to redecorate his face.
But even as he stumbled around the entrance, trying desperately to claw eyelets out of his icing mask, he would surely have conceded that among all his victories in an England shirt, this one tasted particularly sweet.
The tale of Malan’s curious international career is by now well-told: late on the scene and somehow always the first in line to be cut.
Often, he was judged not on how many runs he scored, but on how he scored them, not without reason, but usually with sharper scrutiny than afforded to sexier rivals.
Having played no part in the 2019 triumph, he retained the air of a child looking through a sweetshop window, even once he had started working behind the counter, scooping rhubarb custards into paper bags.
Now, though, this is Malan’s team — not in the sense that he is its dominant figure, but in that he is quite literally in it and in it to stay, no longer needing to spend every minute looking over his shoulder, for all it sounds as if old habits will die hard.
“[There’s] maybe a bit of hunger,” Malan said, after his first Cricket World Cup century set up the 137-run victory that put England’s group-stage campaign back on the right track. “I’m desperate to do well in this format and prove a point that I deserve to be in the team.”
The message was similar when Malan spoke at Lord’s only last month, having just made the hundred against New Zealand that finally put the lingering debate over his World Cup place to bed. As former England batter Mark Butcher phrased it on yesterday’s Wisden podcast, he has since “tucked it in and given it a mug of Horlicks”.
A century from 91 balls was his fastest in ODIs, bar the buffet in Holland last summer. Crucially, given past critique of some stodgy starts, it came via his fastest 50 as well, as he played the early aggressor in an opening stand of 115 with Jonny Bairstow, a promising sign for what is still a novel partnership. Between reaching three figures and his demise, he added another 40 from just 16 balls.
More broadly, it is now six hundreds in 17 ODI innings since the start of last summer, all of them in different countries, and four already this calendar year, a record for an Englishman with at least seven matches to come.
At Lord’s, Malan shared his theory that only freaks and the uber-consistent could break into this team. Now, though, he is combining the two.
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