The fall of Cricketing giants, rise of Test Cricket in India & rise of limited overs Cricket in England

It was when Michael Vaughn's men crushed the Aussie pride in 2005 Ashes series in England, people felt that the downfall of Australian Cricket had begun. However, the Australian team bounced back from thereon as they went on the win the 2007 World Cup. But it was after the 2007 Cricket World Cup glory, the legendary names in the side like Matthew Hayden, Adam Gilchrist, Shane Warne, Andrew Symonds, Glenn McGrath, etc. started to fall apart. The magnitude of this was such that Australia for the first time in their 12 years of Cricket had not made it to the World Cup Final back in 2011.

Even the Indian side after the glory achieved in 2011 World Cup fell apart like a sudden ageing factor had cursed them just 3 months post that World Cup win. India's regular fixtures in the longer formats Rahul Dravid, VVS Laxman & Sachin Tendulkar lost their spark. Pacers like Zaheer Khan, Munaf Patel, Sreesanth, Praveen Kumar & Ishant Sharma had become injury prone. Harbhajan Singh lost his knack of picking up wickets while Gambhir-Sehwag pair lost their consistency big time. All this opened up the loopholes in Dhoni's longer format Captaincy as India got whitewashed in England & Australia on their 2011/12 tours. They had to suddenly rely on young batsman like Cheteshwar Pujara and Virat Kohli. On the other hand, Ashwin was a preferred spinner and was supported by the inexperience of Ravindra Jadeja.

Sri Lanka who for years relied on their senior pros like Jayasuriya, Sangakkara, Jayawardene, Muralitharan, Dilshan, Malinga, etc. had a sudden influx of inexperience. Pakistan's progress was hampered due to lack of home games with Cricket being banned in Pakistan and their matches being moved to UAE. England's excess reliability on players that were used to playing in conditions where there was swing affected their techniques to the extent where they became clueless against some extra pace and bounce and quality spin. South Africa had their own downfall with players like Graeme Smith & Jacques Kallis stepping aside. All these things contributed to the sides becoming dominant at home but struggling to win Overseas in alien conditions. Quite expectedly Australia was the side that was benefiting from this. They continued to hammer their oppositions at home eventually winning the Ashes in 2013/14 with a 5-0 margin and the 2015 World Cup. 

Things were quite different when it came to New Zealand. Infact, a complete overhaul in their domestic structure meant that they had more quality coming in to their national team. However, they found it tough to improve on their poor traveler's tag. They lost a couple of ODI series in Bangladesh.

India's issues however got resolved to a certain extent because of the number of players that emerged from their domestic structure. This was well complimented by the Indian Captain Virat Kohli's mindset of winning at all costs. The players were clearly influenced by his aggressive nature and they wanted to dominate their oppositions at all costs. The home season of India that began in 2015/16 and extended up to 2017/18 saw them play a lot of Test matches on turning tracks. Infact, in this period India had been unbeaten for 19 Tests! Virat Kohli laid down constant emphasis regarding the fitness of the players and he wanted fit players who were willing to put an extra yard on the field. He also constantly backed the pacers (a thing India had failed to do for ages) and assisted in developing the pace battery of India. All in all this lead to rise in Test Cricket for India.

During the 2015 World Cup, England suffered a major upset as they were for the first time in their history eliminated in the Group Stage of a World Cup. And who were the opposition that pushed them out? The Mighty Bangladesh! This lead them to re-think their approach in the white-ball Cricket as a whole and more specifically the ODI Cricket. Their archaic template of keeping the run-rate constant throughout the innings and filling their side with experienced players in the First-Class format without much of credibility in the shorter formats of the game was really hurting them. So they moved away from players like Gary Ballance, Ian Bell, Ravi Bopara, Stuart Broad & James Anderson as far as white-ball Cricket was concerned and brought in players like Jason Roy, Jonny Bairstow, Ben Stokes, Liam Plunkett & Tom Curran. Their new approach was now to bring in as many as limited overs specialists in the team as possible. Their approach towards batting was make maximum utilization of the overs and make huge scores. Along with that they wanted their side to bat deep which resulted in them having bowlers who can bat a bit. This resulted in England's ODI sides batting way down till 9-10 or sometimes even no.11! Between May 2015 & July 2019, England batted first on 48 occasions of which, they scored 300 or more on 31 occasions winning 26 of them. They also successfully chased down a score in excess of 300, 9 out of 13 times. England also scored the biggest ever score in ODI Cricket history scoring 481/6 against Australia at Trent Bridge in 2018. They would eventually go on to win the 2019 WC at home! In short, England became the powerhouse of ODI Cricket.