It’s not right that Morgan and Hales come straight back in

IT was inevitable England would restore Eoin Morgan and Alex Hales to the squad for the one-day leg of their India tour but that does not make it right. There was no way Andrew Strauss could go back on his word that anyone who refused to go to Bangladesh over safety concerns would not have it held against them. But that does not stop Morgan from being under big pressure when he leads a team who triumphed in Bangladesh without him for three 50-over and three Twenty20 games. England, publicly and privately, insist their young one-day team do not hold it against their leader for being absent as they went on one of cricket’s more demanding tours with an enormous security presence. If so, Morgan is a lucky man because it does not take hindsight to say that, once security adviser Reg Dickason had insisted the Bangladesh show was safe to go on, then the captain should have been there to lead it. Jos Buttler was a huge success as stand-in captain and he is the natural choice to step up full-time when a change is made. When that will be depends simply on how many runs Morgan scores because he will no longer have the credit in the bank that being such an instrumental figure in England’s one-day revolution earned him before now. Morgan plays so little cricket for England or Middlesex that it is hard to believe he can improve at the age of 30 and he is no longer the ‘gun’ player in the middle order, as a record of two half-centuries in his last 16 50-over innings suggests. It is unlikely England will want to change before the summer’s Champions Trophy but Morgan will have to be prolific from now on if he wants to be in charge for the 2019 World Cup. Hales, too, will be playing for his future even though he scored 171 against Pakistan last summer, because Sam Billings was superb in the decider in Chittagong in his place and has the potential to be another Buttler. Ben Duckett misses out after his poor form in the India Tests, even though he scored two ODI half-centuries in Bangladesh. That is a shame because England need to ‘rehabilitate’ him quickly and Duckett is a much better bet as a World Cup force in three years than Morgan or Hales. Now he must wait in the wings while the returning captain has to prove himself all over again.