Ben Duckett produced a transformative season in 2016, culminating in a call for England's winter tours of the subcontinent. Career-best performances in all three formats - including the sixth-highest first-class score for Northamptonshire, a one-day double-hundred for the Lions, and a starring role on NatWest Blast Finals Day - pushed him into contention even before the withdrawals of Eoin Morgan and Alex Hales from the trip to Bangladesh made him a near-certainty to be included.

In July of 2016, Duckett scored 650 List A runs at an average of 130.00, a run which included scores of 163 not out and 220 not out, the latter a record, for England Lions. He had begun the season by scoring 282 not out in the Championship against Sussex - it could have been bigger were it not for the washout of the last two days - and he went on to gain further plaudits with a thrilling 84 in the Blast semi-final as Northamptonshire again claimed the trophy. The glut of runs - he had scored more than 2700 in all formats by the time England's squads were announced - practically demanded international recognition.

Things had not been so straightforward when was dropped from England U-19s because of fitness issues, while a court appearance for drink-driving was another wake-up call. However, after Northants' coach David Ripley asked Duckett to open the batting - quite a gamble considering his reputation as an indisciplined middle-order dasher - it began an eye-catching run of form which brought four Championship hundreds in his last eight innings of 2015.

Many England cricketers have passed through the Under-19 side, such is the level of age-group planning, but few can boast the Under-19 World Cup batting average achieved by Duckett. He is one of two players - the England captain Alastair Cook being the other - to have averaged more than 60 in the tournament. He also collected Man-of-the-Match awards with 61 against India in the quarter-final and a century as England beat Australia by one-wicket in the third-place play-off.

Duckett, a wicketkeeper-batsman and product of Stowe School, quickly made strides at Northants where he had been part of the youth set-up since 11 years old. He made his first-team debut at 17 and soon made a maiden fifty against Leicestershire. He then received an unexpected summons to the Northants side as they won the Twenty20 trophy against Surrey at Edgbaston because of an injury sustained by Kyle Coetzer in the semi-final earlier in the day. A few months later, he was dropped by England Under-19s for failing a fitness test and admitted that "complacency" had crept in. His success in the World Cup was proof of his positive response.

His commitment was further questioned, though, when he was omitted from Northants' pre-season tour of Barbados in 2015 as his fitness levels again fell below expected standards. He was chastened that summer by a drink-driving ban (having driven his car off a road a year earlier), but responded in the next week by helping Northants through to the quarter-final of the NatWest Blast and scoring 154 against Derbyshire in the Championship.
ESPNcricinfo staff