When England lifted the T20 World Cup in November 2022, they became the first ever men’s team to be One-Day International and Twenty20 world champions simultaneously. In English sport, triumphs aren’t just rare, they also tend to be followed by a collapse. England’s white-ball cricket side was different: a team that followed scaling the summit by doing so again. They became, as Australia’s captain put it, “the benchmark” for the rest of the world. White Hot tells the full story of how England built one of the most extraordinary sides ever seen in limited-overs cricket. First in 2019 and then in 2022, they produced a series of mesmerising performances to win two World Cups. It is a story of the vision and strategy that underpinned England’s transformation from white-ball stragglers into a side at the very cutting edge of their sport. It is a story of a golden generation, and the development of a system that passed on those values to the players that came next. And it is a story of how a conservative sporting culture shed its inhibitions to become a hub of innovation where players were free to be aggressive, even in the most important games.
