Jason Roy

The powerful opening batsman, and holder of the highest individual ODI score of all time by an England player, has the capacity to take the game away from the opposition at the top of the order

The Cricketer | 04/05/2019 at 09:38

Born: July 21, 1990

Role: Right-hand bat

Dashing, dazzling excellence at the top of the order and the necessary array of sweetly-struck shots to boot, Jason Roy is part of the collective that has come to embody England’s more fearless approach post the 2015 World Cup.

Born in South Africa, Roy came to the UK aged 10 and seven years later made his debut for Surrey.

Roy would have to wait until 2010 for his first real impact at Surrey, when he scored the county’s first T20 hundred against Kent, and his under-the-radar role in their 2011 promotion campaign, which included a maiden first-class hundred, saw him earmarked as a potential England player.

England Lions selectors obliged and gave him a place on the tour of India in 2012, and further white-ball success followed a year later with two centuries in the YB40.

And while Roy’s achievements at this moment deserved credit in their own right, it was the 2014 season where he really came into his own as a consistent match winner.

A competition-high 677 runs at an average of 48.35 in the NatWest T20 Blast was the best example of his transformation, leading to comparisons with Kevin Pietersen because of a tendency to switch hit and power the ball over the ropes.

Such joy in the white-ball cricket did not mean Roy had abandoned his red-ball form, scoring 1,078 Championship runs at an average more than 50, and that average dropped only slightly in the promotion campaign of 2015.

The national selectors responded in kind by handing him his T20I debut against India and an ODI debut against Ireland, but it wasn’t until 2016 that England truly discovered Roy’s talent.

He cracked a couple of centuries against Sri Lanka, including a 162 in front of his home crowd, just five runs shy of Robin Smith’s then-record of 167 not out (which was beaten by Alex Hales’ 171 against Pakistan later that year).

But Roy would eventually usurp both Smith and Hales with a crunching 180 at the MCG in January 2018, before following that up with two further centuries against the Aussies in home conditions in Cardiff and Durham.

Consistency and a tendency to go for all or nothing still plagues Roy, but should he pop up with his bludgeoning A game for even half the tournament, England will have an extremely well-built platform from which to launch the back end of their innings from.

ENGLAND PLAYER PROFILES

Eoin Morgan