Alastair Cook should be in England’s one-day team. There, it’s been said. The man who tends to be more excruciating than exhilarating with whites on has changed into his pyjamas and smashed two successive, attractive, run-a-ball, match-winning Pro40 hundreds for Essex. It’s like turning on Radio 1 and finding out that Barry Manilow is suddenly cool.

Those two hundreds aren’t all he’s done to merit inclusion in a misfiring England line-up. His 337 runs at 48.18 in this season’s Twenty20 Cup, with one hundred and two fifties and a mighty impressive strike-rate of 144, suggested that he’s not so one-dimensional after all.

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