Eoin Morgan's early cricketing education in Dublin was far from conventional

A week on Sunday Eoin Morgan has the chance to crown an England career he began planning as a teenager in Dublin by becoming their first captain to lift the World Cup trophy.

Victory at Lord’s would be the culmination of a remarkable journey for this singular man, one which began at the age of 15 when he and his father Jody requested a meeting with the then Ireland head coach Adrian Birrell.

‘It was basically to plot a pathway of how he would play for England. We set out the stepping stones of how he would go through the Ireland system, playing at Under-19 World Cups, and for Middlesex. That was the start of Eoin’s vision,’ Birrell tells The Mail on Sunday.

Visions tend to become reality for Morgan in spectacular technicolour. Not that he is a dreamer. Far from it. A tenacious desire to succeed drives an individual who always seems to be one step ahead.

Birrell reckons that has something to do with his background. ‘For a very young player, because of his Irish roots, he had a huge amount of experience an equivalent English or Australian player wouldn’t have been able to accrue,’ he says.

Namely that as a cricketer from a minnow nation, his prodigious talents were exposed to three U19 tournaments (his aggregate 606 runs a World Cup record tally) and one with the full Ireland team in 2007. He was given the responsibility of batting at No 3.

With county team-mate Ed Joyce as his trailblazing role model, Morgan was already several years into his residency period to switch allegiance by that stage. That he ended up at Middlesex was down to Paul Farbrace, who first stumbled across him as a 14-year-old. Graham Able, the master at Dulwich College, had previously employed Farbrace as a sports coach at Hampton School. Invited to play for Able’s XI versus the Dulwich first team, a freckled third-former on a month-long exchange stood out.

‘Eoin only got 20 or 30 but he played really nicely and after that game I contacted Kent and Middlesex to tell them that England Under-15, the team I was running at the time, were soon to be playing Ireland Under-17 at Eton College and that this kid looked pretty good,’ recalls Farbrace.

Kent didn’t respond to the invitation, Middlesex dispatched Jason Pooley, their second XI coach. Farbrace adds: ‘I was sat on a bench when Jason parked up, got out of his car and said: “Bloody hell, I have been sent to see some little Mick. I bet he’s ****.” Morgs and I still laugh about it to this day.’

A report from Pooley conveying an opinion at odds with his pre-match prediction led to Morgan lodging with the Knappett family in subsequent summers. Phil was head of Middlesex’s youth cricket. His son Josh kept wicket and went on to a brief first-class career.

As an England age group coach, Farbrace spent four years observing Morgan as an opponent; later four working alongside him in the build-up to this World Cup. ‘Ballsy’ is the answer when asked to describe him in a word. ‘Not only has he said how he wanted his England team to play, he has lived it. When a captain does that it makes it easier for players to follow. He is all about getting on the front foot, taking the positive option, and doing everything to fit what he believes is the right way to win a game,’ says Farbrace.

‘He lives his words. It’s easy to tell your players to play with freedom but to do it as captain of England in international cricket takes balls. When he gets caught on the extra cover boundary cheaply in a big match, his team know he is practising what he’s preaching and they’ll go the same way. It’s undoubtedly why the team have got to where they are. England have benefited from his personality. His temperament has always stood out. When I first knew him, he was a feisty little redhead who knew what he wanted. That’s not really changed.’

Birrell, now head coach of Hampshire, recalls how ‘remarkably independent’ Morgan was in his youth.

He has always been something of an outsider. Cricket was something that the Morgan family, with six children crammed into a three-bed terrace on the St Catherine’s Estate, did together, either on the adjacent tarmac strip which separated their street from open parkland or up at Rush Cricket Club 20 minutes walk away. They were not so much cricket mad as cricket demented.

Evidence of where the sport stood in their household’s list of priorities is revealed by Morgan senior skipping the birth of youngest sibling Evan because it clashed with match day. Sisters Laura and Gwen also played for Ireland.

It was not a community-wide devotion, however, in an area in which hurling dominated, with public reactions to their backyard knockabouts ranging from bemusement to aggressive questioning of why they were playing a British sport.

Undeterred, Morgan honed his craft in the nets at Rush: little more than a concrete strip with an empty beer keg as the stumps. According to long-serving club member Matt Sheridan, the little left-hander was caressing the ball around and ‘managing’ an innings by seven.

During secondary education, he moved house, schools and clubs. Jody Morgan’s job as groundsman at the Trinity College sports complex led the family to the northern suburb of Santry, Morgan was enrolled at the cricket-playing Catholic University School and switched to Malahide, one of the country’s biggest clubs. By this stage, he was under the tutelage of Brian O’Rourke, a coach with both the Leinster and Ireland youth set-ups.

‘He had a fierce determination to succeed and when you couple that with his natural ability it is no surprise that he’s progressed as he has,’ says O’Rourke. ‘He was going down the wicket and hitting spinners over the top early in their spells before it became popular. He had that mindset that he wanted to dominate from ball one and if it meant taking a bit of a risk he was prepared to do it. You can see that he’s taken that right up to the top level. Self-confidence is a huge part of his make-up.’

Niall O’Brien, a team-mate with Ireland, reckons Morgan was always the best player on the pitch growing up and views his change in style from a wrist-flicker of a batsman whose first boundary in Test cricket was a reverse sweep to one whose power game scattered 17 sixes off Afghanistan’s attack last month as evidence of his pragmatism.

In 23 matches for Ireland, his strike rate was 71.67. In England colours it is 94.19 in 208. ‘He’s a very smart individual. He thinks long and hard about things and has seen there’s value in hitting the ball in other areas,’ O’Brien says.

It is also reflective of his single-minded approach. In 2011, he opted to take up an Indian Premier League contract worth £220,000 rather than enter a domestic shoot-out with Ravi Bopara for the spare batting place in England’s Test team. In typical Morgan style, with Bopara fluffing his solo, he returned from the subcontinent to hit 193 for England Lions against Sri Lanka and lined up for the full team days later.

It was during his time with Kolkata Knight Riders that he bonded over beer, golf and horses with Brendon McCullum. They also discovered a mutual regard for a free-spirited blueprint to playing the game for which they were paid. An un-Englishness, if you will.

McCullum’s influence on the England team has been well-documented. He has also been one of those welcomed into the inner sanctum. Last autumn, the New Zealander was master of ceremonies at Morgan’s marriage to Tara Ridgway.

Those who do experience mateship with a naturally wary individual speak of fierce loyalty. But as Middlesex’s managing director Angus Fraser observes, despite the hard exterior, ‘He’s not bulletproof.’

That much was shown in 2015, during the early part of his permanent England captaincy when he took a month off during the domestic season. A tough year had incorporated an horrendous World Cup campaign with a team he’d inherited rather than sculpted and a foiled blackmail attempt by the boyfriend of an Australian woman Morgan had been involved with five years previously. The man had demanded £35,000 after claiming messages containing sexual content were in his possession.

It was wrongly assumed that this time off represented a lack of desire to play first-class cricket but the 32-year-old has made himself available whenever a gap in England’s white-ball schedule appears. Not selected by Middlesex at the end of last season, he was at the start of this.

He is also unafraid to make controversial calls, such as skipping the most recent tour of Bangladesh on security grounds. Public indignation that an England captain was deserting his post did not pervade the dressing room, where his decisions appear to be universally accepted.

Being very much his own man is arguably what stands him apart from his predecessors, and has contributed to him being a semi-final win at Edgbaston away from standing on the threshold of history.

‘He’s England’s best ever one-day player. Is he one of the greats of the game? Well, if he wins the World Cup he will probably stick himself on top of the greats,’ says O’Brien.