There is a glaring Ben Stokes-shaped hole in this England team… and his obvious replacements aren’t even in the squad! writes NASSER HUSSAIN

It would be very easy to look on Saturday’s defeat to Australia and say: there we go again. Yes, it was yet another loss for England but this one will hurt more because they put in a pretty good performance, not a bad one,

There have been plenty of poor displays in one day cricket as four bilateral series defeats in a row and their win ratio dropping to 29 per cent since the last World Cup signifies.

Here, they did a lot of things well: the building of partnerships, someone going on to get a big hundred, making sure their best players of spin in centurion Ben Duckett and Joe Root were at the crease for those middle overs, the new ball spells from Mark Wood and Jofra Archer.

But when you play Australia – even Australia without five very key players – you need to be switched on for 100 overs and in periods England weren’t, or didn’t quite finish the job.

It was funny but even with 351 on the board I wasn’t sure which dressing room I’d rather be in at the halfway stage.

In the old days, that would have been it, yet you just felt England were 30 runs short. With such a solid base, Eoin Morgan’s vintage England side would have got 400, whereas this one lacked the finishing required from Harry Brook, Jos Buttler and Liam Livingstone, and they were only able to put up a new Champions Trophy high total because Archer got hold of Marnus Labuschagne’s last over.

There was the dew factor to contend with. At the toss, Steve Smith said Australia had been training under the lights, that the dew comes down and it did come down. It is an advantage batting second, make no mistake.

Beyond that, though, England have got an issue with the balance of their side – as we saw in India, if they play the extra bowler, Jamie Overton ends up at No 7, or potentially Gus Atkinson. Consider that Glenn Maxwell comes in at seven for the Australians.

Playing the extra batter, you then feel England are a bowler short. Not only that but, behind the banker, Adil Rashid, there are three seamers all of whom have either carried a niggle recently in the case of Brydon Carse or have long-term injury concerns in Wood and Archer.

It results in you going into games a little bit fingers crossed that the seam trio get through 10 overs and are able to put on a show, otherwise you’re a bit stuffed.

If one of them has a bad day, as Carse did this weekend, things get tougher to manage for a captain.

That was one slight difference between the two sides for me, because Smith managed those fiddly fill-in overs brilliantly to drag his side back into things, giving Maxwell a few overs here, Labuschagne a few here there, keeping England down to seven an over.

The Ben Stokes ship has sailed, but the five-wicket defeat at the Gaddafi Stadium showed the value of a player like him good enough to play as a specialist batsman and bowl 10 overs.

So in the absence of Stokes, who else could it be? For my money, two lads that aren’t in the 15-man squad.

Sam Curran could bat in the top seven easily and be a very useful bowler in the mould that Nathan Ellis was for the Australians, bowling cutters and variations.

Or you could go with the left-arm spin and middle-order batting of Liam Dawson. Both are excellent cricketers, but they don’t seem keen on either of them at the moment and so have had to go with the balance they chose for the first Group B fixture.

It is also the XI I would choose on Wednesday to face Afghanistan, opponents who have a perceived weakness against pace.

One thing I would say, however, is that while up front Wood and Archer were excellent I felt, as in India recently, they overdid the short ball.

Josh Inglis is such a good player of the short stuff and they were still running in, banging it halfway down. There were a lot of cuts and pulls in the run chase. There’s got to be a bit more subtlety. 

I thought Australia bowled really straight at Root, not letting him getting away, particularly Ellis their unsung hero: no wickets, but 10 overs for 51, using all sorts of variations, was some effort on that pitch.

Then there was a difference in the two side’s fielding too. In 100 overs, it takes key moments, that’s why cricket is such a great game.

You can do it for 90-95 overs but little incidents influence the whole thing: Alex Carey takes two magnificent catches; if Salt bats for another 10 overs, England get 380; Jofra Archer drops Carey on 49; next over, bang, bang, four, four and the game’s gone.

The frustration from their opening match of this tournament is not that they were miles off, but so close to getting it right.