Joe Root’s modern captaincy represents a sea change for England | Andy Bull

England have become aggressive, flexible and free-thinking, an approach more in keeping with Michael Vaughan than Alastair Cook or Andrew Strauss

Every England fan needs a plan for how to follow a winter series. These last few weeks I’ve been lying in bed listening to coverage of the first session or so through an earpiece, which meant there were moments in the early hours, half awake and half asleep, when England’s victory seemed something like a dream, the work of some undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese. It was not just that they won, though they had not managed to do that in any of the rest of the 13 overseas Tests they had played in the last two years, it was the way they did it.

This victory was unlike any other they have won in recent years. The rhythms were off, the selections strange, the action unusual. Even from this distance, half a world away, this felt like a watershed tour, one that marked a sea change in the way England play the game. As if they had learned, at last, that there was no sense expecting the results to change while they kept doing the same things over and again.

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