Michael Atherton on Harry Brook’s innings in Sydney Ashes Test on Day 1: ‘Lost the plot… was so lucky’ Disclaimer: We do not own any of the content, ideas, images, or text presented here. All rights belong to their respective owners. For more information and to view the original source, please visit the following link: Source link
The England Cricket Board have announced their playing XII for the fifth Test of the Ashes 2025-26 series against Australia, set to be played at Sydney Cricket Ground. England have included spinner Shoaib Bashir and fast bowler Matthew Potts for the Sydney Test. From the side that defeated Australia in the fourth Test in Melbourne, pacer Gus Atkinson is the only player missing, having been ruled out with a hamstring injury. Atkinson is the third England fast bowler who has been ruled out of the Ashes midway through the series. Mark Wood and Jofra Archer were also ruled out earlier owing to injuries. England pacers, led by Josh Tongue, helped the visitors pull back one game after a humiliating Ashes series loss in just 11 days of cricket that saw Australia dominate the Perth, Brisbane and Adelaide Tests to go 3-0 up in the five-match series. SCG is expected to have conditions suited for spinners as well, which prompted England to include Bashir in the 12-man playing squad, who hasn’t played a single Test in this …
England, with their Bazball approach, promised a lot ahead of the Ashes Down Under. However, after three Tests it has been Deja Vu. More or less the same emotions and results that the English players, fans and pundits have been used to. With a series scoreline reading 3-0, former England cricketer Nasser Hussain altough said there have been changes since the last time the English toured the Aussie shores, but in this series it has been the same mistakes they have committed in the previous visits to Australia. “I quite like the fact they have done things differently over the last four years since the last Ashes drubbing. I do like the fact they have thought differently; they have planned ahead. If you carry on doing what you have always done, you will get the same results, so they saw we need to do something different. I quite like that, they’ve thought ahead,” said Hussain on Sky Sports. “But actually, if you’ve come here and looked at them in the last three-four weeks you’d have …
Australia beat England by 82 runs at the Adelaide Oval in Adelaide on Saturday to win the Ashes 2025/2026 in 11 days. The hosts winning the toss and opting to bat first have posted 371 runs. In response, England managed to get to 286 runs and ended up conceding a first-innings lead. In the 2nd essay, Travis Head, in his home ground, blitzed, scoring 170 runs. England were given a 435-run target in the final innings. Although they did manage to put up a fight back, they were bundled out for 352 runs, with Mitchell Starc, Pat Cummins, and Nathan Lyon picking up three wickets each in the innings. After winning in 2010/2011, this was England’s third series defeat in Down Under. With the new Bazball approach, there was a bit of cautious optimism among the English supporters if they could win the Ashes this time in Australia, but their fortunes have been the same this time around. “The dream that we came here with is now over, which is obviously incredibly disappointing. Everyone’s hurting …
Despite England staring at another Ashes series loss Down Under which will mean they won’t be able to get hold of the Urn which they let go off in 2021, former captain Michael Vaughan has warned against wholesale changes to the team. Australia, thanks to a fine unbeaten century from Travis Head on Day 3 of the third Test at Adelaide Oval, have a firm grip on the match with their lead currently standing at 356 runs and six wickets in hand. The Bazball approach which England embraced with an eye on the ongoing series has failed to deliver with their batting approach coming under intense scrutiny right through the series. A defeat in Adelaide would mean fourth successive Test series loss in Australia, where England are without a win in 17 straight Tests. Each of England’s previous Ashes defeats on Australian soil has brought out plenty of changes. However, Vaughan said the England and Wales Cricket Board shouldn’t take a similar route this time despite the series loss. “English cricket often works in four-year …
To restore their battered morale, Ben Stokes and his men hit Noosa, a beach on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast in between the Brisbane and Adelaide Tests. But shadows of defeat followed them to their four-day sandy retreat. Welcoming them on the beach were banners that read, “For sale, Moral Victories… : “Bazballers anonymous, free counselling. Some of England’s cricketers saw the funny side of it. Stokes even posed for pictures with them. Australia’s tabloid newspapers readily splashed pictures of them beach warming with headlines like “On back foot, England bails to the beach”, “Life’s a beach, even for the sinking Poms,” “Sun’s out, runs out”. The West Australian wrote a piece wherein it read: “After gallivanting around golf courses in Perth and joyriding without helmets on E-scooters in Brisbane, England favoured rest and relaxation for their latest mid-series break.” The headline of another piece went: “‘Overprepared’: fails pub test,” a jab at Brendon McCullum’s explanation for the defeat at the Gabba that “the players may have overtrained”. Australia cricketer Alex Carey empathised with them. “It’s a …
The Dunning-Kruger effect is a phenomenon where people with lower abilities in a particular area tend to overestimate their skills, and those with higher abilities underestimate themselves. Former Australian cricketer Greg Chappell has said the current iteration of the England team, with their Bazball approach, is going through the same. “Their catastrophic failure, an echo of past collapses, can be neatly framed by the psychological phenomenon known as the Dunning-Kruger effect,” Chappell wrote in his The Sydney Morning Herald column. Unlike the previous English sides which have come to Down Under and taken a pasting (since 2010/11, which is when they last won a series), there was cautious optimism among fans that the side would compete better; however, after two Tests, Ben Stokes’ side is 2-0 down. “In the context of English cricket’s game plan – the aggressive, often reckless approach dubbed ‘Bazball’ – the effect manifests as an overly positive spin on achievements and an unwillingness to accept that a method successful on flat English pitches and small grounds is fundamentally unsuited to the …
Michael Vaughan who won the most memorable Ashes series in 2005 says they might’ve laughed at age profile of Australian squad at the outset of the 2025 series. But the Aussie system has delivered with its selections, rewarding Grade cricket performances. Writing for The Telegraph, Vaughan said England needed to reconsider how they picked teams, saying, “Right now, England are the opposite of Australia.” Admitting that English cricket fraternity had joked about Australia’s older age profile at the outset, he said they had been proven wrong. “We had a laugh at the age profile of Australia’s team, and there are some cracks that England have failed to open up. But the Australian system has always been about earning the right,” Vaughan wrote. High store was set on performances in the Sheffield Shield, he reminded. “To get in the state team, you need to perform in grade cricket on a Saturday. The whole system is connected in a way ours just is not, top to bottom. Sam Konstas was an outlier last year, almost an England-style …
England skipper Ben Stokes questioned his team’s mentality and urged more fight from his side after suffering a crushing eight-wicket thrashing by Australia in the second Ashes Test at the Gabba in Brisbane on Sunday. After the first two Tests, Australia lead the five-match Ashes series 2-0. “When the game is on the line, teams are able to handle that pressure better than us,” Stokes said to TNT Sports after the loss. “We are a great team when we are ahead, when we are behind and playing huge catch-up we are great, but when then game is on the line we are not able to stand up to pressure. That is obvious as a captain. It’s a mentality, a mindset. How you get yourself into a head space to make clear decisions is so important to be successful at this level,” he said. Having lost the Perth Test in just two days, England failed to put up a fight in Brisbane, losing the Pink-Ball Day-Night Test on the fourth day. England set Australia a paltry …
With his knock of 138 runs against Australia in the second Test of The Ashes at the Gabba in Brisbane, England batsman Joe Root scored his 40th hundred in Test cricket. It was Root’s first hundred against Australia in Australia and with his first Test century in Australia, Root has answered critics as well fans across the world. The England batsman, who is currently placed second in the all-time run getters list in Test cricket behind Sachin Tendulkar, took 30 innings in Australia to score his maiden Test hundred in Australia. With England placed at five for 2 when Root came out to bat on Thursday, former England captain Michael Atherton has termed Root’s innings as ‘innings of his life’. “What matters to him more than anything, is scoring crucial runs at a critical time. He was in for the 16th ball of the innings, at 5-2, so it could have gone horribly wrong. With Mitchell Starc knocking back (Ben) Duckett and (Ollie) Pope for ducks, all those memories of Perth flooding back, but then …
