Five new faces give Morgan a chance to put Trophy exit in past

And so, enter England 3.0. After the crushing disappointment of their Champions Trophy exit, Eoin Morgan’s side arrive on the south coast in search of renewal. A Twenty20 series against South Africa offers the chance to start afresh, with England poised to give five new caps over the three-match series.

Yet Morgan begins the series facing more questions than answers. The resounding semi-final defeat by Pakistan at Cardiff last week was simply the latest all-or-nothing fixture that England have lost in recent years, a run encompassing their epic chokes in the finals of the 2013 Champions Trophy and the 2016 World T20.

Morgan denied that a pattern was beginning to emerge. “A lot of the stuff we’re doing is right,” he said yesterday. “Going into the semi-final we talked about adapting to the wicket, but changing that mindset didn’t happen. We let ourselves down.

“If we’d played really well and still lost, and there was a crunch moment when someone let us down, that would have been a bigger concern. If you look at sides that don’t get through group stages or are always beaten in the semis, there’s something mental going on, it’s a bit of a block. But I don’t think that’s a problem for us.”

All roads now lead to the 2019 World Cup, and with that in mind England are preparing to use a fresh batch of players over the coming days: Liam Livingstone, Dawid Malan, Tom Curran, Craig Overton, and – perhaps the most exciting of the lot – 20-year-old Hampshire legspinner Mason Crane.

The Ageas Bowl, where today’s first game takes place, is the natural place for Crane to make his international debut. The surface will be familiar, the conditions ideal and Crane raring to go after 18 months in which he has gone from a promising second XI bowler to the great white hope of English spin bowling.

“It’s exciting,” said Morgan. “He has all the tricks: googly, slider. I played against him last year [for Middlesex], and Brendon Mccullum got hold of him a couple of times. As a youngster, normally you bowl one bad over to a guy like that, and you’re taken off. But he still had tricks to come back with. That impressed me. He’s still very young, but we want to see what he’s about.”

South Africa, meanwhile, are undergoing their own rebuilding process after failing to progress from their Champions Trophy group, and it will be an experimental side that A B de Villiers leads into battle.