Key, Mott in spotlight as England white-ball team reaches crossroads

Mott is two years into a four-year contract and insisted on Thursday that he is the right man to take England forwards. His team won the last T20 World Cup six months into his tenure but bombed at the 50-over World Cup in India last year. And while they reached the last four in the Caribbean, they only beat one Test-playing opponent across the tournament.

ICC events are now annual occurrences but next year is the first in five without a men’s white-ball World Cup: there is a Champions Trophy scheduled for February but that is the least important tournament in the calendar. After Thursday’s semi-final defeat, England now have a 10-week break until their next limited-overs series against Australia in September.

It leaves Key with a series of questions to answer when he reviews this World Cup. Can Mott reinvigorate a side which appears to have stagnated? Are England making genuine progress under Mott’s leadership? If not, is there an obvious replacement? And would they want to take on the scrutiny of a job where a semi-final World Cup exit is a sackable offence?

Key has made a number of big decisions across his two-year tenure: appointing Ben Stokes as Test captain, gambling on Brendon McCullum, taking the blame for last year’s World Cup debacle and, most recently, telling James Anderson that his time as an England player was finally up. But working out how to revitalise this white-ball set-up looms as the biggest of them all.

This was a strange campaign. England’s warm-up series against Pakistan was blighted by weather and after their first match against Scotland, featuring an uninspiring bowling effort, was washed out a heavy defeat to Australia left them on the brink of a first-round exit. Another hour of rain in Antigua during their game against Namibia would have sent them home.

Then, in St Lucia, they put together a complete performance to end West Indies’ winning streak by chasing down 181 with 15 balls to spare, before losing a tight game to South Africa. They secured their spot in the semi-finals by thrashing USA in Barbados, but conditions in Guyana were never likely to suit them and on a pitch characterised by low bounce, India asserted their authority.

“I think we were good without being great,” Mott said at Providence Stadium, assessing England’s tournament. “If we’re being honest, we weren’t quite at our best. We were hoping to peak at the right time and certainly coming up against India today, we needed to peak and we knew that. This was possibly going to be the toughest test we had and we weren’t quite good enough.”

England were a tense, downbeat team in India last winter but seemed to have learned from their mistakes, hiring Kieron Pollard as a consultant for his local knowledge and bringing back the psychologist David Young, who was a popular presence. On the eve of the semi-final, Mott insisted that England were making progress under him and reiterated that position after their exit.

“You always feel like you’ve made progress when you get to the semi-finals,” he said. “It’s disappointing to finish in that way: whether we lost by one run or the margin we did, we’d be going home very disappointed… [but] there’s not many teams who’d have turned up today and taken that game away from India, given the conditions we faced.”

Yet the sense remains that England have lost their aura. Mott has not been helped by a disjointed schedule which sees him go months without access to his players but after two years in the job, their identity under him is still not clear. They are now in a transitional phase and Key must decide whether Mott has a clear vision for what comes next.

Mott believes his backroom staff are fully behind him. “Jos and I as a partnership have been galvanised in the last six months,” he said. “You learn more about leadership in times of adversity. If you ask around the dressing room, we’ve got a lot of people in the support staff that have given credit to the leadership group for the way we’ve stuck together in tricky circumstances.

“Sometimes it’s not all about results. Obviously we’re in a results-driven business, and you guys [the written press] will have your fun at our expense, I’m sure. But when you wake up in the morning and have a crack and do your best, you can sleep at night knowing that sometimes, results are out of your control.”

Unlike the team of 30-somethings that crashed out in India, this is not an old England squad: seven out of 15 players are in their 20s and in Brook and Phil Salt, there are batters to build around. The English domestic system continues to produce talented young players and further candidates for selection will emerge in the Hundred next month.

Buttler is planning a short break before that tournament starts, and will use the time off to take stock. “You take some time to review tournaments and try to plan ahead for the next [one],” he said. “What we need to do better as a team, if that is the way we play, personnel, style of cricket… we will review everything and come up with a plan.”

It is Key who will ultimately sign off on what that plan looks like – and English cricket needs him to get it right.

Matt Roller is an assistant editor at ESPNcricinfo. @mroller98