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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Knight is in denial if she actually believes what she said. 3 of the 4 matches have been blow outs for Australia and the result of the other was not close. England are not remotely in the same league with Australia. Only 2 England players (Sciver-Brunt and Ecclestone) would have any chance of getting in the Aussie team.
Yeah, we don’t know her well enough to say whether it’s true head-in-the-sandery or media bluster. And if it’s the latter, why? Maybe the tone will change once the series can’t even theoretically be levelled.
Although the chippy response to criticism of some of the team’s fitness/athleticism perhaps suggests a culture of the former.
Not with Ecclestones fitness levels
It would help if they got asked some tough questions! It’s all too nice. Hartley dared to pop her head above the parapet and state the obvious and look how the England team reacted. Look at what happened to Gower, Botham, Gatting, Atherton, Hussain back in the day. If you wear the badge and you seriously under perform you should expect to cop it
I’ve interviewed HK a few times and she only ever speaks in cliches and platitudes.
Have always got that impression.
This is a top piece by the way. Hope you are not disappointed at lack of engagement in the comments relative to the effort/length of the post, but I reckon it’s because you said it all above the line.
The only thing I might want to add is that I have some sympathies for losing captains getting interviewed. When their media training kicks in it does reduce the value of what they say. But it does so deliberately because media trainers know that the stuff reporters love to pick up on is generally not the stuff it serves your own purposes to come out with.
You shouldn’t be dissing your own players in public, you shouldn’t be giving out realistic assessments of your chances of winning the next match or the series overall (from a mental point of view, it probably doesn’t even help to be doing a realistic assessment of your chances of overcoming huge odds, let alone letting the world know that you’ve been thinking about it), you should always seem to be taking the positives no matter how thin on the ground they are…
Still, at least it helps to get the tone right, and that’s not been achieved here. As for whatever is going on inside the dressing room, or team environment generally, there’s not a huge indication from the outside that it’s carrying the appropriate tone and attitude and weight of analytical insight either.
I also have a lot of sympathy for those whose job it is to ask the questions at interviews, given the difficulty of getting a straight response, or even one likely to be interesting to viewers and readers. And worse still if you’re a recent former player with relationships with those involved. I am not a fan of the media being too cosy with the players, but I’m even more not a fan of personal relationships getting strained when someone asks the tough questions they’re paid to.
We’re not disappointed but we are slightly surprised there haven’t been more comments. It’s quite an open-ended piece, we thought. We haven’t necessarily landed on a firm position.
Agree with your point that it’s often counterproductive to dwell on frailties, weaknesses and inferiorities. We suppose at some point a few of them – ones that can feasibly be addressed – need to be acknowledged.
Nuanced posts aren’t the ones which maximise engagement, yer maj! If you’d settled strongly on a firm position, someone would come along in the comments to castigate you for it. I reckon most of us can see our views reasonably well reflected – and you said it better than I could, at least.