The leadership of the England team is likely to come under scrutiny following their 16-0 Ashes drubbing
Valkerie Baynes01-Feb-2025England Women’s head coach Jon Lewis has declared himself the right man to lead the team beyond their unprecedented 16-0 Ashes drubbing in Australia.Scrutiny of Lewis’s position is sure to intensify after his side lost the Test by an innings and 122 runs inside three days at the MCG. ECB management will no doubt hold a thorough review of the tour but, speaking immediately after the Test defeat which concluded the multi-format Ashes series, Lewis was defiant.”I strongly feel that there’s real growth still left in this group of players,” Lewis told TNT Sports. “Through the series, all three parts of this series, we played lots of young players.Related
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“I really feel that I haven’t finished the job that I came here to do. Obviously the results haven’t gone the way we want them and I’m really committed to the people because we’ve got a really good group of people within the dressing room. I’m really committed to them. I’m really committed to growing women’s cricket in England. So yeah, I feel like I’m the right guy to do it.”Lewis did not believe the results in Australia, which also included T20I defeats by 57 and 72 runs respectively in the first and third games of that leg and 86 runs in the third ODI, warranted a wide-ranging review of the structure of the women’s game in England, which has undergone dramatic change over the past five years.”That happens regularly,” Lewis said. “I think just to do it after every away Ashes series is probably not the right way to do it. One of the great things we will do from this series is we will learn, we’ll have to learn and we’ll have to move the team forward and we’ll look at every single aspect of what we do internally.”I’m sure the people that work externally from this group in particular will look at that as well. It’s something that happens regularly on a yearly basis. We review everything all the time, we reflect and we think and we try and grow the team and try and grow the sport.”We obviously need to compete better across the bilateral series we play against Australia. But also we’ve got World Cups coming up as well every year. There’s a 50-over World Cup coming up this year in India, and then the following year, the 20-over World Cup at home…every year there are big tournaments to play and we’ve got to turn things around really quickly.”Lewis also paid tribute to the “juggernaut” Australian team, who bounced back from barely retaining the Ashes in England in a 2023 series drawn at eight points all, to crush their opponents this time around.Heather Knight’s position as captain will likely come into question•Getty Images
Beth Mooney stood out with the bat this time around, scoring 409 runs across all formats while also standing in as wicketkeeper for the injured Alyssa Healy during the T20s. The next-highest run-scorer was Heather Knight with 229.Mooney and Annabel Sutherland both scored centuries in the Test, where England’s highest score was Nat Sciver-Brunt’s 51 in the first innings, followed by Tammy Beaumont’s 47 in the second, where only two England batters passed 20.That was in light of legspinner Alana King’s nine wickets for the match as she finished with 23 overall in a Player-of-the-Series performance. Ash Gardner claimed five across the Test, including 4 for 39 in England’s second innings.”Australia have played some magnificent cricket,” Lewis said. “They haven’t let us play the cricket we want to play. They put us under a lot of pressure in their home conditions and we had a couple of chances early on in the series to create a couple of opportunities to win games of cricket and we didn’t take them.”We didn’t help ourselves at times, especially in the field. We dropped Annabel Sutherland on 30, Beth Mooney three times, I think, before she got to 20. That’s a big area of our game that we saw at the World Cup as well that we really need to improve.”We’ll look at all areas of our game across this tour and across the winter and try and review really thoroughly and pick the bones out of everything and try and come back stronger because that’s what we need to do.”Knight, whose position as England captain has also come under pressure, was asked by the host broadcaster whether she had played her last Ashes match in Australia.”I don’t know,” Knight said. “At the moment it’s obviously all quite raw and it’s happened pretty quickly. The next few weeks will be about working out what’s best for the future, I guess, so we’ll see. It’s something that will be worked out in the next couple of months, what the future of the team holds, I guess.”Knight said her side’s failure to take their chances in the first two ODIs, which Australia won by four wickets and 21 runs respectively, and a tight schedule which didn’t give England much time to turn those defeats around were the key differences between the sides.Those games, and the rain-affected second T20I, were the closest of a series which wasn’t really that close as England struggled throughout with poor fielding and shot selection.”With this Australian team, when they’re on top they’re really good at pressing home their advantage and keeping that winning momentum,” Knight said. “It’s been a really tough, frustrating tour… credit to them, they’ve played some remarkable cricket, have had some different people performing at different times and won those big moments and pressed home the advantage when they have been on top.”