The side may have sought to ‘inspire and entertain’, but this Ashes series, they have failed to do either
elbourne’s cricket ground is famed for its size. It has never seemed larger than it did last week, when England’s fielders were chasing the ball all over its vast green sward. Both on the ground and in the air the ball just kept escaping them, as Australia’s batters scored the first, then the second, ever centuries by women at their country’s oldest sporting venue.
England v Australia is meant to be one of the great showcases of women’s cricket, and this edition was hyped accordingly. The sides are ranked one and two in the world. Their meetings contain a juicy beef, cooked up by decades of rivalry between both the women’s and the men’s sides. And their last encounter, in summer 2023, had turned into a thriller as Heather Knight’s England came back from the seeming dead to draw the series.
Such an epic humbling in the land of Lillee and Thomson, Warne and Waugh, Johnson and Starc, is nothing new to English cricket. The women’s efforts over the past three weeks have earned a place in the pantheon of disastrous Ashes tours established by their male counterparts, several of them in the past 20 years. It easily holds its own against the, or the infamous Covid collapse of 2021-22. Perhaps it can’t quite live up to Alastair Cook’s 2013-14 “Pomnishambles”.
The claim appears to be a refutation of professionalism in sport. What is the point of athletes dedicating themselves to full-time training if sporting outcomes are decided by the amount of time you spent outside as a kid? And yet these England women are the most professional ever to wear the three lions on their caps.
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