England captain Ben Stokes justified the team’s decision to forego a pink-ball tour match on Saturday, saying that while they had learned from their devastating first Test loss to Australia, they had moved on.
In a thrilling two-day contest in Perth marked by batting breakdowns and Travis Head’s game-winning 123, Australia won by 8 wickets to take a 1-0 lead in the five-match Ashes series.
Following the match, former greats denounced England as “brainless” and even “arrogant” for their lackluster performance despite putting themselves in a solid position to win.
“We’ve talked about it and we’ve moved on,” Stokes said in Brisbane ahead of the second day-night Test starting on Thursday, adding: “We had some good conversations around the group.”
“Look, Travis played an amazing knock, there’s no hiding away from that,” he said. “But that’s not the overriding contribution as to why we didn’t end up getting the result.”
Stokes observed “amazing things throughout that Test match.”
“The way that we bowled in the first innings…and we ended up putting a score on the board that we believed was definitely defendable,” he said.
“But we all know there were moments in that game where we could have been a lot better to help us gain even more of an advantage that we did have. We know that and we understand that. And the important thing that you need to do from that as a team and as individuals is learning from that.”
At the Gabba in Brisbane, England will have a difficult assignment to level the series with Australia, the pink-ball Test masters who have won 13 of the 14 games played under lights. Management decided not to include any of England’s key players in a two-day, day-night match against a Prime Minister’s XI this weekend in Canberra, despite the country’s far more inconsistent record.
Former Ashes captain Michael Vaughan called the decision “amateurish” and said he was “staggered” that they would decline the chance. Stokes acknowledged the blowback, but he supported England’s decision to hold more training sessions in Brisbane.
“There’s where it is, it’s in Canberra, which is a different state,” he said. “The (weather) conditions are obviously going to be completely different to what we’ve got coming up. So what you try and do is you try and take all the factors into consideration, the pros, the cons, whatever it may be, and then you always discuss that and decide what is it that we think is going to be our best preparation.
“We know that we are doing everything that we can to make sure that we are best prepared for this game,” he added.
