“Don’t go for second best baby – put your cricket to the test,” as Madonna didn’t quite sing on her 1989 hit Express Yourself. England talk a lot about the batters “expressing themselves”; but it’s something they’ve had little chance to do in the ODI leg of this Ashes series, as Australia’s bowlers have turned the screw ever tighter.

England rolled the dice by bringing in Emma Lamb to open the batting in place of Lauren Winfield-Hill, who has gone more than 5 years without passing 50 for England. Lamb had a good ‘A’ series, but coming into an Ashes series is a step up at the best of times, and with just one game to prove herself against the rampant opening bowling of Ellyse Perry and Megan Schutt, the pressure was really on the Lancashire Thunder player.

And it didn’t work out – Lamb falling to a lovely delivery from Perry that was pitched up and moved late, for a 2-ball duck. But this absolutely wasn’t a case of Lamb having been tried and failed – she can’t be judged on one innings, especially if the other option is to go back to Winfield-Hill, who has been given the benefit of the doubt for the best part of fifty innings!

And the bottom line anyway is that nobody has really “succeeded” for England in this ODI series. Tammy Beaumont got to 50 today, but it was the slowest 50+ innings of her ODI career at a Strike Rate of 49.5, and she couldn’t push on. Nat Sciver made an even slower 46 at a Strike Rate of 48.4, which was the slowest ODI innings she’s ever played having reached double-figures.

England have now been whitewashed in their last two ODI series versus Australia, and they haven’t beaten them in an ODI since 2017. And far from closing, the gap appears to be widening – England’s batters just can’t score runs against Australia, it’s getting worse, and today they looked like a side that knew it.

And yet whilst England have come up second-best against Australia again and again, they’ve maintained a win percentage against everybody else of over 70%. Add matches against everyone else to that chart, and the “Ashes Dips” versus Australia in 2019 and now in 2022 are startling apparent, amid what’s otherwise a decent record.

This is what England need to take away from this series – they have come up second-best against Australia, but they are still the second-best team in the world; and that’s not a bad place to be going into a World Cup. It’s not going to be easy to keep believing that through 10 days of hard quarantine in New Zealand, but believe it they must.

As for Australia, they go to New Zealand perhaps firmer favourites for the title than they’ve ever been, having lost just once in their past 30 ODIs against all-comers. With the Ashes wrapped-up, the tournament is theirs to lose – for Lanning & co, second best will not be good enough.

This week – a ‘Where did it all go wrong?’ special!

• Where did it all go wrong for England ‘A’?
• Where did it all go wrong for England?
• Where did it all go right for Kate Cross?

England ‘A’ flew back from Australia yesterday after a tough few weeks against their Australian counterparts. The first T20 was a close match – Alice Capsey hit 44 off 31 ball as England ‘A’ set the hosts 129 to chase, which they did with just 3 balls to spare.

But it was largely downhill from there. Australia won the 2nd T20 easily, and though England did set them 158-7 in the final T20, with Eve Jones and Emma Lamb both hitting fifties before the rain came and washed out any chance of a result, it went from bad to worse in the One Dayers, with the Aussies running out easy winners in all 3 games.

Nonetheless, as cliched as it might seem, it is important to take the positives from a tour like this. It wasn’t all about winning, it was about the experience gained and the lessons learned, in particular for some key players who will no doubt be back in Australia one day on a real Ashes tour.

Batting Rankings

Wunderkind Alice Capsey had a good T20 series, but the real winner here was Emma Lamb. Lamb has of course already played for England, though she didn’t face or bowl a ball in her only appearance; but with her performances on this tour she has staked a clear claim to open the batting for England going forwards, and Lauren Winfield-Hill is going to have to have a very good next few weeks if she is going to keep Lamb out much longer.

Bowling Rankings

Kirstie Gordon hasn’t played for England since July 2019, and could theoretically return to Scotland this summer; but continues to make the case for an England recall with her aggressive left arm spin. Having said that, the emergence of Charlie Dean might make that more difficult, especially if Dean matures into a “proper” batter at international level.

Lauren Bell meanwhile seems to have leapfrogged the other contenders in the fast bowling department with her performances in Australia. After being added to the Test squad, she was also the only out-and-out bowler retained as an option to come into the World Cup squad, should injury strike anyone in the main squad during the final two Ashes ODIs. Like Lamb, her debut will come, if not this winter, then almost certainly in the summer.

The England ‘A’ team flew home yesterday, after a chastening series against Australia ‘A’ – Australia winning 5 of the 6 matches played between the two sides, with the other game a wash-out. Only one match – the first T20 – could really be described as ‘close’.

However, 4 players from the ‘A’ team impressed enough with their performances to stay in Australia pending the announcement of England’s World Cup squad, which is expected on 9 February – next Wednesday.

Lauren Bell, Georgia Elwiss, Eve Jones and Emma Lamb will be available to be selected as one of the 18 players (15 squad players plus up to 3 reserves – see here for a quick explainer of how that works) travelling to the World Cup in New Zealand immediately after the Ashes.

There are cases for all four to be included in the 18. Having Elwiss – a classic “utility player” – as one of the travelling reserves would make a lot of sense. However, it feels likely that the others have been retained in case anyone gets injured in the final two ODIs, so their various fan-clubs should probably keep the champagne on ice for the moment.

Squads are now being named for the Women’s World Cup, which starts in New Zealand on 4 March – South Africa named theirs yesterday, and England’s is expected to be announced next week, on 9 February.

As well as the 15 players included in the main squad, South Africa also announced 3 ‘Travelling Reserves’ – something all teams are able to do.

Up to 3 reserves are able to travel with each team. They will fly to New Zealand and quarantine along with the official squad; and will to all intents and purposes be part of the squad, except on match days.

They will only be eligible to play if they are swapped into the official 15-player squad in the event that an injury (or “The Dreaded ‘C’ Word” – COVID) forces a squad player to withdraw from the competition; so they won’t be able to be used to just rest or rotate squad players, and they won’t be able to act as substitute fielders, but they could still be called-upon at a moment’s notice, should the worst happen.

One final factor teams need to consider is that there is also an overall limit on the number of people able to travel to New Zealand, so some teams are opting to take fewer reserves, because this allows them to bring additional support staff.

England’s Ashes hopes went up in smoke at Manuka Oval in Canberra, despite having the Aussies on the ropes as they posted just 205-9 from their 50 overs – well short of the 287 that Australia have averaged batting first since the last World Cup.

Alyssa Healy, interviewed pitch-side about half way through Australia’s innings, said they were looking for 220-240, but they were frustrated by another disciplined bowling performance from England, with Katherine Brunt taking 3-40 and Kate Cross 3-33. Since her return to the side in 2021, after a couple of years on the sidelines, Cross has averaged 2 wickets per game in ODIs, a significant step up from the earlier in her career.

Australia’s batters struggled as a unit, but in a low(ish) scoring match if one person can stand up, that can be enough. Beth Mooney was that player for Australia – she was the only Aussie batter to pass 30, but she pushed on to make 73, and crucially made sure she was still at the crease to face the final ball.

So the key question was… could anyone from England do the same?

Although England lost two early wickets, Lauren Winfield-Hill and Nat Sciver stabilised things and looked to be building a solid platform at 39-2 after 10 overs. Winfield-Hill played some of the nice shots we know she can play, and hopes were high that this might be the day she’d finally break the “duck” that has seen her go 5 years and 46 international innings across all formats without passing 50.

Winfield-Hill was out the very next ball, but Sciver was still in a position to do what Mooney had done, and with the support of Amy Jones she continued to make progress.

Jones’s wicket is one that will continue to generate debate – it was definitely 50/50, and if it had been given the other way, it certainly wouldn’t have counted as a “howler”. One of the issues is clearly that the law is a bit vague, because waist heights are a bit vague (ask any woman who has ever bought a pair of jeans!) so it is too open to interpretation, even if (as a few people on social media suggested) we used the ball tracking tech rather than asking the Third Umpire to draw lines on the screen with their eyes.

By the time we got down to the Sciver-Wyatt partnership, it felt like it was “S*** or Bust”! The problem with playing the extra batter is that you only really need them when you are in trouble, and if you’re in trouble… then you are already in trouble, so it rarely works out, especially chasing.

Sciver’s dismissal for 45 was the moment when “decline” became “fall” – there was a gap of 28 runs between what Sciver made and what Mooney had made. And how many runs more did England need to win the match? Exactly 28! That’s not to blame Nat Sciver – the batting unit failed collectively, and the responsibility must be collective – Australia’s attack wore them down, good ball by good ball, until there was nothing left – bowled out, despite being ahead of the worm.

So we’ve lost the Ashes. Again. England might be one of the top two sides in the world, but they definitely aren’t in the top one.

We probably knew that already, to be fair; but if we needed a reminder, today was it.

With the final two sessions of day 3 entirely lost to the rain, and similar weather forecast for tomorrow, a draw now looks like the most likely outcome of the Women’s Ashes Test in Canberra.

The play that we did get mostly went England’s way, as Heather Knight overhauled her previous Test best score of 157 to finish on 168*. Over 60% of England’s runs off the bat came off Knight’s eponymous SM “HK” – surely one of the great individual performances in the history of women’s Tests.

There was much talk on comms of whether England would declare behind, but in my view they did the right thing of pursuing what you might call a “de-facto declaration” strategy – playing much more freely in order to close the gap on the Australian total before the inevitable final two wickets fell. This meant they didn’t take too much time out of the match, but also got much closer to the Australians than it looked like they were destined to when they took tea yesterday at 120-6. In the end the deficit was just 40 runs; and a tricky twenty minutes at the crease for Australia before lunch.

The stage was set for Katherine Brunt, and she strutted on to it as only she can – taking two quick wickets: Rachael Haynes caught by Tammy Beaumont fielding up-close off bat/pad; and Alyssa Healy caught behind by Amy Jones. It was the nightmare scenario for Australia, and gave England a real chink of light – perhaps Brunt had been right when she told the media yesterday that England could still win this?

And then the rain…

A towering undefeated 127 from Heather Knight was enough… just… to keep England in the game at Manuka Oval; but an Australian victory now feels like the most likely outcome to this Test.

The day began with Katherine Brunt completing her 3rd Test 5fer thanks to a remarkable 6th catch behind the stumps for Amy Jones – both have been brilliant for England; and Jones’ “6fer” is the joint most catches ever taken in a Test innings.

Australia had promised to push on towards 400, but instead unexpectedly declared on 337 after losing their 9th wicket. Mind games? From Meg Lanning? Matthew Mott later denied it, saying they’d changed their minds to take advantage of favourable bowling conditions in the morning; but who’s to say that wasn’t more mind games? (Mott’s entire pitch-side interview during the afternoon session was a master-class in saying absolutely nothing. Would you use the follow-on Motty? Well… it’s an interesting question… we might… or we might not! Seriously: the man should consider going into politics when he’s done with cricket!)

England walked out to bat knowing the ball had been doing all-sorts – swinging in for Anya Shrubsole and moving away off the pitch for Brunt – and the Australians soon had it singing too. There was a lot of nearly-playing and nearly-missing early on, and it felt like wickets were coming. Ever the optimist, I attempted the old “reverse jinx”, snarkily texting a friend: “I think England will be one or two down at the close… in their second innings, having followed on!”

Unfortunately, I wasn’t a million miles away – England settled into something of a routine of losing a batter roughly every 10 overs, with only Heather Knight holding them together. Knight scored 58% of England’s runs off the bat on her way to her second Test century – soul-food for starving England supporters.

But with conditions continuing to assist the Australians, the other full-time batters struggled to keep their heads above water, and it wasn’t until Charlie Dean came in that the tail started to… well… not “wag” exactly, but at least not “roll over and die”.

I’ve often worried that the English “CAG” (County Age Group) system teaches girls to value their wickets too much over actually scoring runs, which is a problem when you are mainly looking to develop white-ball batters; but at the point Dean – a player who has really only just emerged from the CAG system – came in, that was exactly what England needed. Dean blocked and blocked, allowing Knight to continue to make progress at the other end, and it was only when she lost her concentration and started to try to score runs, that she found herself walking back to the dugout. (Her CAG coach would have been furious at the limp slog-sweep she got herself out to!)

Nonetheless, Dean had showed the way, and with more support from Shrubsole and then Ecclestone, Knight took England past the follow-on target. It wasn’t a victory obviously, but much like the boy’s draw in the men’s series at the SCG at few weeks ago, it somehow felt like one; and certainly the Australian’s will have been frustrated not to finish England off before the close.

England still officially believe they can get a result from this match, with Katherine Brunt saying at the close: “I think you can win from anywhere” and promising that England would “fight like hell” for the victory. But they still trail by 102, and Australia are now in pole position to wrap up England’s first innings early tomorrow morning and then bat them out of the game. Then, as long as the weather holds (which is looking 50/50) they’ll still likely have time to bowl England out again and retain the Ashes before the ODI series even starts.

The 2022 Women’s Hundred competition will be truncated to just 6 games per side in the group stages, in order to accommodate the Commonwealth Games, which runs from 28th July to 8th August in Birmingham.

The men will play two rounds of “stand-alone” fixtures prior to the women’s competition starting on Thursday 11th August, with the rest of the competition running as double-headers, following the success of this model in 2021. This means that rather than the women’s group stages being a true “round robin”, every team will effectively skip one opponent.

As with last year, the group stages will be followed by an “Eliminator” between the second and third placed sides (played at the Ageas Bowl on Friday 2nd September), with the winner meeting the top-placed team in the final at Lord’s on Saturday 3rd September.

Although this outcome is disappointing from a sporting perspective, the ECB faced an unenviable dilemma given the timing of the Commonwealth Games, in which almost all of the top England and overseas stars are likely to be involved. There were only bad options, such as starting the competition without the big-name players, or ditching the link-up with the men’s comp completely, so on reflection this was probably the least bad choice.

CRICKETher understands that the plan is to return to a full program of 8 group fixtures (the 7 “round robin” fixtures, plus the additional “derby” match between the local rivals) in 2023.