Posted by Did England drop seven chances today because the British idea of beach sport is going down the arcades and spending half an hour on one of those penny pusher games? Probably not, but there must be some reason why they’ve arrived at the wheelless phase of an Ashes tour.
Lack of fitness has been the peg off which criticism has been hung during this series, but only really because people feel it’s symptomatic of – and therefore also emblematic of – a wider attitude and approach.
When head coach Jon Lewis said that fitness wasn’t the reason England weren’t winning in Australia, the generous interpretation is that he meant it wasn’t the sole reason.
“I think their discipline and their skill level has been higher,” is how he concluded that particular thought. Is fitness not in large part a product of discipline? Skill too for that matter? Is he saying the team hasn’t been striving for sufficiently high standards?
Without watching the England players go about their work day-to-day, this is the worry with this team: that their current notion of ‘doing enough’ is way less than Australia’s. That’s the real criticism. Fitness is just shorthand for that.
“Doing Surf Lifesaving, or playing touch rugby”
“You guys need to come watch them,” Lewis told Cricinfo last week. “I promise you. I cannot defend them more around how hard they work on their physicality. They are incredibly dedicated to what they do. I’ve never seen a cricket team work like this cricket team, and I’ve worked in professional cricket for 31 years.”
Confusingly, he also said in the same interview that Australia are, “a much more athletic team than us. They’re more agile, they look faster, at times they look more powerful.”
That’s a weird combination of facts, isn’t it? The hardest-working team he’s ever known are being outperformed.
So if England really are leaving no Atlas stone unturned, lifted and carried, how is it that Australia are physically superior?
You’ll no doubt have heard Lewis’s already infamous theory that it’s down to “a cultural difference” – that Australians are out playing touch rugby down at the beach while Britons huddle in front of fires in their wattle and daub pit dwellings. (This is not a direct quote, just the general gist.)
But if you’re effectively in charge of a team’s culture, maybe that’s exactly what needs to be addressed. If everyone really is “incredibly dedicated” to working on their physicality, maybe they’d also be willing to, say, sign up for open water swimming if it closed the gap on those Surf Lifesaving Aussies. (Lord knows, they’d surely gain an edge in terms of sheer grit if they did that, relative water temperatures and all.)
That specific suggestion’s flippant, but the point is that if England’s perception is that they’re operating at 10/10, maybe they should have a quick check whether they’re actually using Spinal Tap amps, because all the evidence suggests there’s scope to go “one louder”.
Progress
Speaking after the World T20 exit late last year, Lewis said: “There was some really honest discussions within the playing group about how we were on the field and off the field in and around the World Cup in terms of our preparation and how we did things and how we wanted to be on the field.
“There were some really important discussions around how we were on the field in particular. And then the response to those discussions were about how we wanted to go and play our game and make sure that we were as fearless as we have been in the past and where we slightly drifted away from that as a group and I felt like the team responded really well to that.”
That’s the talk, but you then need to act on the talk. Walk it, as they tend to say. Perhaps even run.
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