Two-and-a-half years after becoming England’s Test head coach, Brendon McCullum is starting the job many thought he was destined for in the first place.

McCullum was, it seemed, being lined up for the white-ball position when first interviewed by the England & Wales Cricket Board in 2022, but swerved what he viewed as a “cushy” job in favour of the rather more seismic challenge of reviving a desperate Test team.

From this month’s tour of India, which begins on Wednesday, McCullum unites the roles, steering the red-ball side towards the winter’s Ashes while adding responsibility for a limited-overs outfit that was not long ago dual world champion but, in 50-over cricket in particular, has lost its way.

His reign starts with a five-match T20 series, but with the Champions Trophy only a month away, it is the three one-day internationals that follow that matter most.

McCullum’s task on that front is perhaps even stiffer than the one he inherited with the Test team, or at least comes with a narrower pathway to success.

Yes, he would work miracles in turning a record of one win in 17 Tests into 10 out of 12 across his first year in charge, but that was never the brief.

The Test team was in such a spectacular rut when McCullum came in that neither managing director Rob Key nor England supporters were banking on the overnight transformation of that thrilling first Bazball summer, and certainly not demanding that they go to Pakistan and win 3-0. Had McCullum done half as well as he did in that period, he’d still have been doing all right.

Expectations this time are higher, on two counts. The first is of McCullum’s own brewing, the Kiwi now thought of as some kind of coaching Nick Knowles: leave your clapped-out cricket team with us, pop off to the in-laws for the weekend and come back when the refurb’s complete.

Second is that, nearly six years on, this ODI side exists in the shadow of 2019, the country’s greatest ever limited-overs team setting a lofty benchmark amid hope that the regression under Matthew Mott may prove a blip.

The numbers, though, say the inverse is likely to be true. England’s win percentage in ODIs since the home World Cup is 47 per cent, more or less in line with their all-time ratio of one win in two; the 66 per cent at which Eoin Morgan’s team ran through the four-year cycle up to 2019 was the real freak.

Though McCullum’s appointment represents the start of a new era, England could — in Jofra Archer, Adil Rashid, Joe Root, Mark Wood and captain Jos Buttler — field five of their world champion XI in the same line-up during the three-match series in India. That would be more than played together in any ODI in 2024, and had Ben Stokes been fit, it may well have been six.

It confirms that though England’s reluctance to move on from more of their golden generation cost them in the dismal title defence of 2023, the depth of talent waiting to succeed them has often been overstated.

True, there are more English white-ball players getting exposure around the world than ever before, but almost exclusively in T20 leagues.

Many of the new crop have played more T10 matches than one-dayers and since the advent of the Hundred, plenty have played no domestic 50-over cricket at all.

Aided by some ease in the calendar, McCullum has unsurprisingly moved to more closely align the 50-over and Test set-ups.

The best young players in the country — Harry Brook, Jamie Smith, Gus Atkinson and Jacob Bethell — are all in his first squads and are all multi-format cricketers. McCullum must now prove his magic works across codes, too.