Early in England’s innings during the first Twenty20 in Kanpur on Thursday, Sam Billings rocked back and played a textbook pull shot off Jasprit Bumrah for four. The next ball, Jason Roy clipped Ashish Nehra for two runs off his pads. The next ball, Roy got on the front foot and drove Nehra with a beautiful straight bat, over mid-off for six.

Three balls, 12 runs. And yet not an unorthodox swipe, fancy flip or filthy mow among them. In fact, there was nothing intrinsically “T20” about any of those shots, except the audacity required to play them at the very start of an innings. All three would have been equally at home in a Test match, or the MCC coaching manual.

To cling together, or to drift apart? It is one of the debates, I fancy, that will define cricket for the next few years, and perhaps long thereafter. Is it still valid to think of its three different formats as part of a single continuum: three variously-flavoured isotopes of what remains essentially "cricket"? Or are the red-ball and white-ball games diverging to the extent that it is possible to envisage a future where they are, to all intents and purposes, different sports?