It is May 12, 2015, and Andrew Strauss is about to hold his first press conference at Lord’s as England team director. He will announce why Kevin Pietersen will not be recalled to the side following his sacking a year earlier, and explain why Peter Moores has lost his job as head coach.

Before he met the media, Strauss called Morgan, who had been captain at the World Cup where England were battered in Australia and New Zealand, and looked thoroughly miserable in the job. Morgan was licking his wounds in India playing in the IPL, and thought he was going to be sacked when Strauss’ name came up on his mobile phone.

Morgan was in Hyderabad, having breakfast at the Sunrisers team hotel, preparing for a game two days later against Bangalore. Instead of telling him he had lost his job, Strauss asked him if he wanted to stay on. It was the first of two occasions when Morgan thought he might lose his job. We will come to the second later on.

In a short phone call, Morgan and Strauss agreed there had to be wholesale change in personnel and approach. Crucially they knew they had the players and talent. They just needed unshackling.

“I came into the job with my own frustrations of playing in two World Cups when we had prepared poorly,” says Strauss now. “There was a realisation on my part that if we want to perform differently in a World Cup and take white-ball cricket more seriously then we have to do things very differently to the way we have done in the past.

“I knew Eoin well. I knew what he brought to the party. I knew the way he played his cricket and knew him as a person because I had played a lot with him for England and Middlesex. It wasn’t a case of me sounding him out. The feeling was ‘what am I looking for and who is the best guy in the team environment to role model that’. He was exactly the sort of person I was looking for.

“Eoin had only just started in the job and it would have been very harsh to blame him for what went on in the World Cup. He did not have the team he wanted and I just felt he could do something special.”

The first selection two weeks later was crucial. Bayliss had been appointed coach, but would not take over until the Ashes later that summer. Morgan went into a selection meeting at Lord’s with Strauss, James Whitaker, then chairman of selectors, Angus Fraser, Mick Newell and Paul Farbrace, who was in charge of the side until Bayliss arrived.

They talked about how everything had to change. Morgan wanted players to whom aggression came naturally, even when out of form and backed into a corner. Farbrace backed him to the hilt, playing a vital supporting role at such a crucial juncture of the team’s rebirth.

“We have a lot of pivotal players now,” Morgan tells me when looking back at that meeting. “Adil [Rashid] has been brilliant for us. Jos has been brilliant. As we go through the World Cup, different guys will have days where they are brilliant as well. We have a very strong side. That is what makes us a big threat.

“It has not been about ticks on the list. Never has been. It is a case of we can do this. It is about eliminating doubt and removing barriers that were there before to create belief.”

Bayliss wanted Jason Roy in the side having worked with him at the Sydney Sixers in the Big Bash. Roy, Alex Hales, Ben Stokes, Buttler and Morgan would be the core of the aggressive batting order. Root the anchor.

Bayliss had spoken on the phone to Strauss and Farbrace and insisted on one thing: he wanted a spin bowler who could beat both edges of the bat.

Moeen missed the series to work on his bowling ahead of the Ashes, creating a space at seven. England chose Sam Billings to bat in that position, an important sign as far as Morgan is concerned now because it showed real intent. England could have picked a safer option; a bulwark against a batting collapse. Instead they went with another firecracker.

“Someone said at the end of the meeting we could be 70 all out with that batting line-up,” says another team source. “It was said as a joke, but was also serious too. But we stuck with it and that selection was a big statement. It was a crucial start.”

“We needed to completely reset our relationship with white-ball cricket,” says Strauss. “These opportunities come very infrequently. Once you have got an established team it is quite difficult to make wholesale changes.

You almost become committed to a bunch of players after a year or two of developing a side. But we had this opportunity at the end of the World Cup that if we want to play this way we could make it happen.

“We wanted a top seven that are all match-winners and not too many of those kind of play-maker guys who set the game up. We wanted a spinner who turned it both ways. We wanted those sort of players who scare the opposition.”