England should drop excuses and accept criticism of England women's cricket team after Women's Ashes disaster

SecondIt's still early days but we already have an irresistible contender for the most impressive English sporting event of 2025. The Ashes attempt is over. As a result, one of the most anticipated women's series in recent memory, a match between the top two teams in the International Cricket Council's world rankings, has been completed before the halfway mark of 10 days of scheduled action. The final game was a Test at the MCG, which should have been one of the most exciting games, but it was an ongoing game before the captains met for the toss.

Well, teams can queue up at immigration, with Alastair Cook's 2013-14 side likely to be ahead of them. England have sent many teams to Australia over the past decade, but each team has returned in a different way. England fans are connoisseurs of tour debacles, and the latest one was the worst of them all.

There's no shame in being beaten by the Aussies, who everyone agrees are one of the strongest teams in the sport. But from here in England, the team's media appearances increasingly feel like they're from another planet rather than the other side of it.

England captain Heather Knight repeatedly insisted “we were really close” in a series of increasingly confusing post-match interviews. Indeed, as they occupy the same geographical area of ​​Australia's 22 yards as their opponents and are otherwise far apart.

Forget about the gap between England and their opponents. The bigger issue is the gap between the way England have played since arriving in Australia and the team they should be. If Knight, her players and their head coach Jon Lewis were honest with themselves, they would know they fell far short of their own standards, let alone Australian standards. It's one thing to be behind a better team, but it's another thing entirely when the team you're behind is the same team you were this time last year.

Their batting has been soft, even their senior players have given up their wickets with a series of three outs when they were ready, and their fielding has been disastrous, with a series of runs at crucial moments Scoop catches dropped and their thinking was muddled both off the field and on the field, and they botched several key passages of the game. When your best batsman plays the same sloppy sweep in consecutive overs, when you throw a dolly off the match-winner on 31 runs, when her team needs 22 runs to win , when one of your plate batters forgets to hit a run from a free and leaves the tail end to face, your problem is not the opponent. England had chances in every game but missed them.

Unfortunately, honesty doesn't seem to be one of this team's qualities, and one of the few who tried to offer it was BBC commentator Alex Hartley, the team's 2017 World Player of the Year Cup winner and former teammate of several current players. Sophie Ecclestone was apparently so upset by Hartley's legitimate comments about the team's lack of athleticism on the field during last year's World Cup that she still refuses to speak to her. She wasn't alone — Hartley said other players and even coaches dismissed her.

Instead, what we got was a series of excuses and platitudes such as “It was a bad throw” after the first failure, “It wasn't an easy wicket” after the second failure and “The pair of batsmen came Said it was very difficult “to score on that surface after the third time.”

Knight seemed to give up completely after the fourth quarter when she said “I don't know” in response to a question about why their defense was so bad. Frankly, it's an insult to the intelligence of those who follow them. Because the truth is, defense has always been an area of ​​the game where hard work is more important than talent.

It's a tough job to stand there and explain another defeat, but listening to Knight and Lewis you can't help but feel England are cheating themselves, even if they're not cheating anyone else. They often talk about how to be braver. If they are brave enough to admit their failure, this will be a start. All this pressure they're under is a natural consequence of the evolution of the game.

With bigger audiences and better pay comes higher expectations. It just means that people who follow the team, like Hartley, care about how they perform, and England are lucky to escape as little scrutiny as they do.