England rise proudly made in Australia

England may be very happy with themselves right now, but if we’re all being honest we need to pay homage to a guy who is as much of an Aussie legend to English eyes as Kenny the plumber.

Trevor Bayliss couldn’t be more of an Australian stereotype if he recited and acted out the whole knife scene from Crocodile Dundee.

He’s a normal bloke, unwarped by fame or any pretence of famousness since he’s taken the job. He even has a place in Port Lincoln. How lovely.

This I know, having spent the best part of five months living in the back pocket of Trevor and his assistant Paul Farbrace.

These guys have taken a different approach to the game than former coach Andy Flower – Bayliss and Farbrace know cricket is struggling in the UK for air time compared with football, and make the extra effort.

Bayliss, though, needs to be celebrated. He took over England in May and has inspired the team to heights they didn’t think were possible.

Seven players on duty at the Wanderers had each played fewer than 30 Tests, and Bayliss knows the future is much brighter than it has been for some time.

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England coach Trevor Bayliss talks to the squad during training at Newlands in Cape Town // Getty

"It's hard to look into the future but you look at some of those players ... the potential is there," he said.

"But potential never won anything. You have got to go out and do the hard work and not take everything for granted.

"You have got to go out and keep having that attitude on the field, keep striving to get better.

"We prepare to go out and play good cricket. If we play good cricket we'll be in with a chance of winning. If we win a few Test matches there'll be a chance of going up the rankings and becoming the best team in the world.

"The future of this team could turn into something special."

It’s hard to believe just eight months have passed since the clumsy sacking of Peter Moores in the rain-soaked surroundings of Malahide when English cricket reached its most recent nadir.

Moores was a dead man walking. He had flown straight from Barbados, where England had just lost the final Test against West Indies, to the coastal town outside of Dublin for his side’s one-off ODI against Ireland.

But the forecast for Moores was gloomy on every front, the coach’s transatlantic trek ending with the sack. News of Moores’ fate had been leaked 24 hours before Andrew Strauss, newly installed as England’s director of cricket, officially pulled the trigger.

It was a big call from Strauss, who had been tasked with rebuilding the national set-up after a horrendous winter that had seen England knocked out of the World Cup at the first hurdle and then held to a 1-1 Test series draw by a West Indies team labelled “mediocre” by Colin Graves, the England & Wales Cricket Board’s chairman.

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Coach Trevor Bayliss and captain Alastair Cook at the Wanderers in Johannesburg // Getty 

Three days after Moores’ rain-drenched downfall in Dublin, Kevin Pietersen scored a sensational triple hundred for Surrey in the County Championship.

The calls for the exiled batsman’s recall were deafening. Yet Strauss again held his nerve and acted decisively, meeting Pietersen that night and telling him he had no future as an England cricketer.

It was a bold move and one, in the afterglow of this stunning series success in South Africa, that has been proved absolutely correct.

This young England team are on the rise and the decisions made in the first few weeks of Strauss’ tenure early last summer laid the platform for a resurgence that would not have been believed by anyone who was witness to the chaos at Malahide last May.

The renaissance started under Farbrace, Moores’ assistant who took temporary charge of the team and set about bringing some fun back into the dressing-room.

An example of that was the reinstatement of the team’s football games that are now a ritual at the start of every day’s play. Farbrace’s carefree outlook was reflected in an exhilarating Test win against New Zealand at Lord’s, when his decision to promote Ben Stokes to No.6 was repaid with superb counter-attacking innings of 92 and 101 from the Durham allrounder.

Strauss then made his biggest and best call to date in ignoring the clamour for Jason Gillespie to be named England’s new coach and installing another Australian in Bayliss.

Bayliss had previously worked alongside Farbrace with Sri Lanka, and the pair started off their new life together with a surprise Ashes series success against Australia.

A 2-0 Test series defeat against Pakistan in the United Arab Emirates followed.

But this latest triumph has underlined not only the potential of this young team but the wisdom of those decisions made by Strauss early last summer.