Posted by Sand drawing is best left to the ni-Vanuatu. You want to make a line that people will pay attention to, etch it in stone or something.
This time last year, England were knocked out of the T20 World Cup in the group stages. Their final match, against the West Indies, saw them drop Qiana Joseph five times. On two of those occasions, fielders on the boundary essentially dropped her for six.
Speaking ahead of the Ashes that followed a month or two later, then head coach Jon Lewis described that experience as “a really nice line-in-the-sand moment”.
According to Lewis: “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.”
A particular area of focus was how they dealt with pressure situations. We’re not really in spoiler territory here when we say that these issues were not unequivocally resolved in time for the Ashes. Australia won all seven games.
On one single day during the Test match, England dropped seven chances.
“We felt like we couldn’t do anything right out in Australia and we obviously felt hugely negative about our whole experience there,” said Sciver-Brunt recently.
“Cricket-wise, we just didn’t put out the performances that we wanted to and that we would have been proud of. We have been reflecting on that, trying to draw a line in the sand and bringing in different things on and off the pitch. It has been a really good catalyst for us to be in the place that we are now.”
These bloody lines in the sand.
Talk is famously inexpensive and further discounts can be had if you shop around. England’s progress under new coach and captain combo Charlotte Edwards and Nat Sciver-Brunt will be judged not in words, or in beach art, but on the field.
We’re not sure what tinpot local airport they flew to the 2025 World Cup from (“I’ve been through the mill to even get on the plane,” said Heather Knight) but the very, very early signs are that they’ve found their feet okay in India. They played four warm-up games and won them all.
Impressively, one of those was against India. Even more impressively, another was against Australia – a team so dedicated to winning, you imagine they even practise the toss.
Now Sciver-Brunt and her team are underway in the tournament proper and seemingly hell-bent on dismissing all of South Africa’s batters before they get chance to offer up any chances that might be dropped.
Strong start. But pressure awaits.
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Very strong start. So strong, your headline might even be contra-Betteridge, KC..
We used to say, in his playing days, that Jon Lewis was never knowingly under-bowled. Possibly in his coaching days he was never knowingly understood.
I know you don’t do requests, KC, but…Chris Woakes?
While the usual rule is that any request immediately rules out an article on that subject, on this occasion, yeah, we probably should.
We’re currently in the thick of it a bit though – book promotional stuff for one, but sadly we also need to claw back some financial ground via other work as that project hasn’t yet paid for itself (and books being books, we won’t be doing any chicken-counting in that regard either).
P.S. Please buy our book.
P.P.S. We probably will write something about Woakes, but it might arrive on a match report sort of timescale.