England rule the T20 world while their ODI game quietly falls apart
Harry Brook’s side just swept India to go top of the T20I rankings. In the 50-over game they sit eighth, their lowest in twenty years, and the first ODI against India showed why.
Jul 15, 2026
England are the best Twenty20 side on the planet. They are also the eighth-best one-day team, their worst standing in twenty years. Both of those things are true right now, in the same summer, with more or less the same group of players, and the gap between them is starting to look less like a quirk and more like a warning.
The 4-0 hammering of India that just took England top of the T20I rankings, and the loss in the first one-day international that followed, tell the whole story in the space of a fortnight. One format, England look untouchable. Switch to the other, and they look like a team that has stopped keeping up.
A T20 side without an equal
Give England their due, because the T20 team is genuinely brilliant. Sweeping India 4-0 ended a reign at the top of the rankings that had lasted more than 1,600 days, and it was no fluke. Since Harry Brook took charge last year his side have won 20 of their 23 completed T20Is, a run that has turned England from contenders into the benchmark everyone else is measured against.
They do it with a clear identity. The batting comes hard from the first ball and rarely relents, and Jofra Archer has given Brook a pace spearhead who unsettled India all series. India, world champions only months ago, lost four in a row in a bilateral T20I series for the first time in their history. That is the level England are operating at in the shortest format.
The 50-over numbers tell a different story
Then you look at the ODI record and wonder if it is the same country. England have won just eight of their 26 one-day internationals since the 2023 World Cup, and last year managed only four wins from 15, ending 2025 in eighth place. The previous time they sat that low was 2006, before the white-ball revolution that made them world champions ever happened.
It is not one bad run either. England have lost five of their last seven bilateral ODI series, went through the last Champions Trophy without a win, and at one point dropped 11 away one-dayers in a row, their longest such streak. Most worryingly, the slide has left their automatic qualification for the 2027 World Cup in genuine doubt, with sides below them in the table close enough to leapfrog them before the cut-off.
The India series is the split in miniature
What makes it strange is that this is not a squad short of white-ball talent. The same names that terrorise attacks over 20 overs are, more often than not, the ones misfiring over 50. At Edgbaston that pattern held again. England posted a competitive total, then watched Axar Patel and Washington Sundar knock it off with an unbroken stand of over a hundred, India cruising home by six wickets in Birmingham.
You sense England have quietly let the ODI format drift while pouring everything into T20 cricket, and for a while the trophies and rankings in the short game made that easy to ignore. The danger is that a format they once owned is now one they are scrambling to even qualify in. Being number one at T20 is worth celebrating. It should not be allowed to hide what is happening a rung down, because on current form England could turn up to the next 50-over World Cup, if they get there at all, as also-rans in a competition they used to win.