Posted by England don’t change captains too often. The previous one, Charlotte Edwards, made her international debut in 1996 and served as captain from 2005 until 2016 when current captain, Heather Knight, took over. Knight has previously said she’s grown more relaxed as a leader over time because she believes that’s what later teams have needed. We’re not too sure what the current team needs, but given Australia have retained the Ashes at the very earliest opportunity, perhaps that belief should be revisited.
Writing after Australia had claimed the first six of the 16 points available in this Ashes, the Guardian’s Raf Nicholson suggested that of late England have handled significant defeats, “by either trying to pretend it does not really matter or by presenting handy excuses.”
There’s something to be said for talking things down as a means of taking the pressure off your team when a big series is still live, but the peculiar breeziness of some of Knight’s comments has come across more like a form of detachment.
> Ashes, second ODI: Really, if we’re honest, England just wanted the defeat more than Australia
For example, she apparently felt her team were “ahead for most of the chase” in the third ODI, which is only really true if you take wickets out of the equation. (For obvious reasons, international captains don’t habitually do that.)
Australia have since retained the Ashes with victory in the first T20, after which Knight concluded her post-match interview by saying, “Frustrating today, but on to the next one.”
On the one hand it’s unwise to read too much into off-the-cuff comments in a post-match interview. On the other, they can be an insight into the general vibe of a team.
Assessing the latest defeat, Knight blamed “a little bit of mis-execution,” adding that, “if we’d kept them to 20, 30 less, we would have been in the game for sure.”
We presume the ‘mis-execution’ was a reference to the batting in the way that any particular dismissal (paffing one to mid-off, say, or missing a straight delivery) can be presented as just a small, isolated error if you’ve sufficient motive to view it in such a way.
She might also have been referring to the fielding, which judging by the highlights was frequently mediocre and on a few occasions honestly a little bit shit.
It has to be said that “20, 30 less” isn’t such a small thing in a T20 either. In this format, conceding an extra 20-30 runs is generally going to be match-losing. Audibly wishing you hadn’t done so therefore amounts to wishing you’d played well enough to win rather than so badly that you lost – a bit meaningless in other words.
As we’ve already said, such are post-match interviews, but this is in the context of England not really having gone anywhere in the Jon Lewis era.
What next? Sophia Dunkley says everyone’s 100 per cent behind Knight, which as much as anything sounds like no-one else really wants the job.
One small disclaimer to all of the above: Australia are an extremely good cricket team.
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