Alex Hales has been portrayed more than once in the last few weeks as a kind of future-cricketer, some gleamingly finessed visitor from the new world. Here he comes now, clanking out of his sponsored DeLorean, England’s first real child of Twenty20 (it has, after all, only been 10 years) all set to recalibrate with a few well-timed and largely orthodox attacking strokes the way English cricket goes about developing its elite-level talent. No pressure, then, Alex. Just don’t fail, will you. We’re all taking a bit of a risk with this.

It is, of course, an unnecessarily onerous way of welcoming any player into a new level of international sport. As Hales prepares to make his one-day international debut for England at Bristol on Monday, a batsman whose basic strength is his boldness and uncluttered eye will do so burdened vaguely by a wider sense that he is obliged not just to make runs but also to do so with feeling – and help provide an answer, six months before the World Cup, to a system that has lagged behind at this level tactically and technically for far too long. Which is certainly one way of preparing a rare, occasionally fragile batting talent for the pressures of international one-day cricket. Albeit not a particularly good one.

Indeed, the real story of Hales’ selection is why it has taken so long. Last year, at the Big Bash, Hales stepped off a plane in Melbourne, opened the innings for his new employer the Renegades and swatted a brutal 89 off 52 balls in a televised match in front of a large crowd. When he was out caught on the boundary, the bowler Moisés Henriques could be seen shaking his head in awe as Hales walked off and mouthing the words “Christ, that bloke’s a bully!”

“He’s unbelievably destructive,” Eoin Morgan said this summer. “He’s like nobody else we have around.” And, of course, the stats already bear it out. Hales is the best Twenty20 batsman England has produced. He has three of the four best English T20 international scores, and access to the kind of breezy, long-levered attacking strokes that can make an opposition look like they simply don’t have enough fielders.

Sport is a capricious business and the Nottinghamshire batsman may well go on to fail in 50-over cricket. But what seems unarguable is that he should have had the chance to do so before now, and that the old ability to identify, home in on and decisively dither around the best sporting talent remains intact.

There have been doubts about Hales’ defensive technique against the new ball in 50-over cricket, bolstered by some poor form in county cricket before the second half of this summer. In England this notion of what is good and bad technique only ever seems to go one way. If Alastair Cook struggles to find gaps or clear the field in ODIs then this is simply how he plays, a good technique in the wrong format, rather than an inability to master skills a batsman like Hales has worked just as hard at honing. Plus – and rather depressingly – there have been other reservations about a cricketer who is, not to beat around the bush, a bit of a lad: a social-media fiend and all-round extrovert with a very clear idea of the rare and precious qualities possessed by Alex Hales.

At least one former England coach has raised a doubt about these less clubbable qualities. And here again is evidence of a certain fatal stodginess. Hales may or may not succeed in the longer forms. But show me a team that’s picked on the basis of its bedside manner and I’ll show you one that has not reached very many World Cup finals in the past 20 years.

So, what’s changed? For one thing, Hales has been in such fine form he is simply unignorable right now. His last 11 innings have brought four hundreds across all formats and provided compelling evidence that he is neither a 20-over batsman nor a 50-over batsman, just a very good one.

Certainly there is nothing obviously unorthodox in Hales’ basic method. His hundred against Sri Lanka in Chittagong at the World Twenty20 was basically a series of entirely respectable attacking shots, the kind that might have decorated a much longer first-class innings, just condensed into a dramatically shorter length of time at the crease, like watching a real-time montage of a four-hour Test match hundred.

Beyond this there has been a degree of enforced evolution for England’s 50-over team. The build-a-platform tactic, apparently gleaned from studying old black-and-white tapes of the Gillette Cup, has seen them overrun too often abroad and Hales now looks like the most obvious instant panacea.

To accommodate the adjustment in tone there has already been a fair degree of hopeful talk that English cricket might have found “our David Warner”, a player who can swim upstream, inverting the usual process by moving from short-form to long. It is a slightly forced comparison. Warner is a curious, sui generis cricketer, more successful in Tests – where his record is superior to that of Cook at the same stage – than he is in 50-over cricket. While Hales, for his part, has a better T20 international record than Warner at the same stage, with more runs at a higher average and higher range of score.

The best part of the comparison is perhaps technical. Both are deceptively simple pyrotechnic batsmen. At 6ft 5in, Hales may be the tallest man to open the innings for England (he also has unusually long arms) but the 25-year-old’s best attacking shots are noticeably restrained. Like Warner, he is a player of simple movements, with relatively little to change, beyond the considerable mental leap, as the game gets longer or shorter.

At the end of which Hales seems to offer a degree of hope, not just for an unduly steady top order but also – perhaps – for the wider issues of how exactly English cricket goes about processing its more brittle high-end talents, whether power-hitting openers or unorthodox spin bowlers. Selecting your most destructive batsman to make his debut at the top of the order six months before a World Cup when all else has already failed is hardly a case of English cricket hurling its bowler hat in the air and learning to dance the samba. But it is certainly an intriguing prospect.

Hales deserves a run at this, plus the same opportunity to fail before he succeeds that a more biddable talent would receive. It has been a rather chaotic road to this stage. Perhaps, sink or swim, it might yet prove an instructive one.