There were fewer than eight months between Eoin Morgan’s pair of retirement announcements, the first from international cricket last summer and then, on Monday morning, from all forms of the game.
The tributes to a magnificent international career were written last June, salutes to a two-time World Cup winner and England’s all-time leading run-scorer across both T20 and ODI formats, though the former record has since been surpassed by his successor as captain, Jos Buttler.
The assumption then was that the influence of one of English cricket’s most transformative leaders would go on to extend well beyond his career and, as it turns out, eight months has proven time enough for the point to bear out.
Most obviously, the team that Morgan led to 50-over glory on home soil in 2019 have doubled-up, the first men’s team to ever achieve the feat following November’s T20 World Cup triumph. Morgan was a rank-and-file member of the side that won the same tournament in the Caribbean 12 years earlier, but that success felt something of an isolated occurrence and, paradoxically, after near-misses as captain in 2016 and 2021, the 2022 edition in which he played no literal part feels a more prominent aspect of what is a still-evolving legacy. Fittingly, Morgan was on the outfield at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, working as a pundit for Sky, to congratulate teammates past and celebrate in a success he had helped construct, if not complete.
Bigger picture, while Morgan was playing his final professional games for Paarl Royals in the new SA20 this winter, more English players than ever before were spending their own off-seasons earning franchise coin in leagues around the world. Their services are so in-demand partly due to the sheer number of gigs now up for grabs, but also as a direct consequence of the success under Morgan, which has inspired the next generation of talent to approach the game with similar gusto and established England as global standard-setters in white-ball cricket, a quite ridiculous sentiment when he inherited the captaincy in late 2014.
This is the house that Morgan built, the England men’s white-ball team turned into a game-advancing institution, defined by its foundations, character and structure, more than any of the soft furnishings that might come and go with what, in an era of competing priorities, has necessarily become a rotating cast of incumbents.
The 2019 triumph was the culmination of a four-year journey lived by a core group of players, but the cultural shift that came with it is now so engrained and so well-defined that England were able to slot more or less half-a-team into place a month out from last year’s T20 World Cup and still deliver. For the same reason, many still give them hope of defending their 50-over title in India later this year, despite a run of four ODI series without a win.
The most recent of those came in South Africa only a few weeks ago, where reminders of the philosophy and principles upon which Morgan’s leadership was built hung in the air like smoke from a braii. Even at 2-0 down, the talk from the England camp was all of taking positives, of reinforcing values, of going harder next time. Batters, once selected, were given all three matches to make their case even when failing, to the point that the spare, the unfortunate Phil Salt, did not get a hit. Jason Roy, Morgan’s talisman, scored a redemptive hundred long after he might have been shelved by the previous era, which ended when another opener, Alastair Cook, was stripped of the captaincy and his shirt during a poor run of form.
There was even a subtle doff of the cap in Morgan’s direction when vice-captain Moeen Ali suggested England’s biggest challenge might just lie in everybody else catching up with his team’s lead. Influence permeates and, after all, this was a three-match series in which England averaged almost 330 runs per-game and still lost two of them.
The story of seven years, and counting, of unprecedented English success owe plenty to the most illustrious of support casts. There is Andrew Strauss, the director of cricket who shared Morgan’s vision, and Trevor Bayliss, the coach he hired as a white-ball specialist with the loftiest of briefs. There is Buttler, England’s greatest limited-overs batter and a World Cup winning-captain in his own right, as well as Ben Stokes, the hero of two global finals, now in the midst of a similar Test revolution alongside Brendon McCullum, the close friend from whom Morgan drew so much early inspiration.
But when English cricket looks back on a golden era that has not yet reached its conclusion, there will be no doubt as to its central figure.
