England should ditch excuses and accept criticism after Women’s Ashes disaster

Early days, but we already have an irresistible contender for the most underwhelming English sporting effort of 2025. After four defeats in nine days, and just 303 overs of competitive cricket, England’s attempt to win back the Ashes is over already. So, one of the most eagerly anticipated women’s series in recent memory, between the top two teams on the International Cricket Council world rankings, is cooked before it made it halfway through the 10 days of scheduled play. The final game, a Test at the MCG, which ought to have been one of the great occasions, is done as a going contest before the captains have met for the toss.

Well, the team can join the queue back at immigration, Alastair Cook’s 2013-14 squad are probably up there somewhere ahead of them. England have sent plenty of teams to Australia in the past decade and every one of them has come back shellacked one way or another. England fans are connoisseurs of losing tours and this latest one has been one of the worst of them.

There is no great shame in being beaten by an Australian team who are, everyone agrees, one of the strongest to play the game. But from back here in England, the team’s media appearances have increasingly started to feel as if they are being beamed in from another planet, not the other side of this one.

The England captain, Heather Knight, has been insisting repeatedly in a series of increasingly deluded post-match interviews that “we’re really close”. Which is true in so much as they are physically occupying the same 22-yard stretch of Australia as the people they are playing against and way off in every other sense.

Forget the gap between England and the opposition. The bigger problem is the gap between the way England have been playing since they arrived in Australia and the team they are supposed to be. If Knight, her players, and their head coach, Jon Lewis, are honest with themselves they will know they’ve fallen well short of their own standards, let alone Australia’s. It is one thing to be second best to a better team, but another again if the side you are falling behind is the one you were yourselves this time last year.

Their batting has been soft, with even their senior players giving away their wickets with a series of triple-ply dismissals when they were well set, their fielding has been calamitous, with a series of spoon-fed catches going down at crucial moments, and their thinking has been muddled off and on the field, where they’ve bungled a couple of key passages of play. When your best batters get caught in consecutive overs playing the same sloppy slog-sweep, when you drop a dolly off the match-winner on 31 when her team needs 22 to win, when your one set batter forgets to take a run off a free hit and leaves the tailender facing, your problem is not the opposition. England have had chances in every game and let every one of them get away.

View image in fullscreen Heather Knight is insisting that England are ‘really close’ to Australia. Photograph: Linda Higginson/AAP

Unfortunately, honesty does not seem to be among the team’s qualities and one of the few people who has tried to offer any, the BBC commentator Alex Hartley, a World Cup winner with the side in 2017 and a former teammate of several of the current squad, has been frozen out for having the audacity to say out loud what everyone else watching them is already thinking. Sophie Ecclestone is apparently so upset with Hartley’s justifiable remarks about the team’s lack of athleticism in the field during the World Cup last year that she is still refusing to talk to her. She is not the only one – Hartley says other players and even coaches have been giving her the cold shoulder.

What we get, instead, is a series of excuses and platitudes such as “it was a bad toss to lose” after the first defeat, “it wasn’t a straightforward wicket” after the second and “it was very difficult for the batters to score on that surface” after the third.

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Knight seemed to give up altogether after the fourth when she said “I don’t know” in reply to a question about why their fielding was so poor. Which is, to be blunt, a bit of insult to the intelligence of the people who follow them. Because the truth is that fielding is, and always has been, the one area of the game when hard work in practice matters more than talent.

It is a hell of a hard job to stand there and explain another defeat, but listening to Knight, and Lewis you get the unavoidable sense England are kidding themselves, even if they are not kidding anyone else. They talk a lot about how they need to be braver. It would be a start if they were brave enough to own up to their failings. All this pressure they are labouring under is the natural consequence of growing the game.

Bigger audiences and better salaries bring higher expectations. It only means people following the team, such as Hartley, care about how well they play and England are lucky to escape with as little scrutiny as they have been receiving.

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