Half-centuries from Jason Roy, Eoin Morgan and Joe Root powered England to another one-sided success against Sri Lanka, their eight-wicket win a fifth successive white-ball canter. It also wrapped up victory in their three-match ODI series with a game to spare, and having prevailed in all three Twenty20 matches the side now heads to Bristol for Sunday’s final fixture in search of a two-format whitewash against thoroughly downhearted opponents. After this game Morgan promised some squad rotation for the final match of the series, with an international debut for George Garton among the possible novelties, but he will be determined not to let the pressure on their opponents falter. There has only ever been one series between these teams that was anything like so one-sided, and as it happens England’s win at the Oval, completed with seven overs to spare, came 15 years to the day after that series’s final fixture. In 2006 it was Sri Lanka, a young Lasith Malinga to the fore, doing the whitewashing, but both nations’ short-form fortunes have since been transformed. The tourists started this match so appallingly that for them to bat out their overs and post a vaguely challenging score was a minor triumph. But Sri Lanka needed quick wickets if they were to successfully defend 241 on a pitch harbouring few demons, and instead Roy and Jonny Bairstow took the game away from them. Bairstow initially let Roy take most of the strike and all of the risks: of the pair’s first 50 runs Roy scored 40 off 26 balls, and Bairstow nine off 20. The Yorkshireman promptly set about catching up, hammering 14 off the next over, only to be undone by Wanindu Hasaranga, whose emergence has been the silver lining on Sri Lanka’s clouded tour. In the end Bairstow faced only three Hasaranga deliveries, and he edged them all: the first into his pads, the next just past the stumps, and the third into them. Roy followed not too long afterwards but, as he had in the previous game, Root sensibly steered his side to victory, finishing unbeaten on 68. While for England’s red-ball captain this was a second successive half-century, his white-ball counterpart had gone 15 international innings without one. Morgan ended on 75 but very nearly missed the milestone: in the space of four balls he smote a massive six off Hasaranga to reach 49, narrowly survived an lbw shout and then edged into his pads and just past his stumps for the streakiest but most welcome of singles. In this series even the good fortune is one-sided. Sri Lanka’s innings had started chaotically, with the first 10 deliveries featuring three lbw decisions against them, all of them reviewed and only one successfully. So it was that in the second over of the day, bowled superbly by Sam Curran, the tourists lost two wickets, both reviews, and very nearly any hope. Curran then bowled Pathum Nissanka midway through his next over, and when Charith Asalanka spliced a pull straight to the fielder at short midwicket it was 21 for four. Enter Dhananjaya de Silva, who with assistance from first Hasaranga and then Dasun Shanaka transformed the innings from the dismal to the merely quite bad. Dhananjaya got 91 from as many balls, and of the 17 boundaries scored by Sri Lanka before his dismissal was responsible for all but four, with several excellent drives through the narrow arc between mid-off and extra cover. It was a miscued pull that did for him, and after the three wickets that fell to Sam Curran’s opening burst the remaining six beaten batsmen were all outfoxed by short balls of no great pace. On his home ground, Curran ended with a first international five-fer and Willey took the other four, meaning that all nine Sri Lankan wickets were taken by Northampton-born left-arm seamers, a curious statistic that might in the end be the one thing that makes this one-sided contest worth remembering. “We’ve played a lot of cricket in front of empty stadiums but today, in front of my home crowd, the first time actually seeing that new stand full, was really special,” Curran said. “I’ve played a few games for England now and hadn’t got that five-fer so it’s a relief to get the monkey off my chest, or whatever they call it. It was such a good feeling, I can’t really describe it. It’s pure elation and enjoyment.”