Zak Crawley has promised England will still be hunting for victory on the fifth day of the third Test in Adelaide, despite slipping to 207 for six in pursuit of a record fourth-innings target of 435. “It’s an uphill battle from here,” Crawley said. “But the boys are going to give it a good crack tomorrow. We’re staring down the barrel, so it’s disappointing. But we’ll never give up.”
Crawley also had words of support for Ollie Pope, who was dismissed for 17 and now averages almost exactly that amount in 18 innings in Australia. Crawley, however, maintained Pope has delivered when England needed him and was also playing well.
“That’s just cricket, to be honest,” the England opener said. “I’ve had lots of tough times, so has everyone who’s ever played cricket. I feel like Popey gets a hard time, but I’m trying to work out why. He’s played really well in the last year. He’s got big hundreds when you need to against tough opposition.
“On a lot of occasions when we need him to score runs he has done. He’s had a couple of quiet games, but I think he’s an unbelievably good player who plays in a really hard role at No 3.”
In fairness, Crawley also suggested that anything said in an England press conference should be “taken with a pinch of salt”. In this case, he was referencing his own captain’s suggestion there was “no place for weak men” in the dressing room after the defeat in Brisbane. Despite a more measured England batting display here, Crawley was adamant there had been no change of messaging.
“We haven’t spoken about that. I just think they’ve bowled very well. [Scott] Boland, for one, he just very rarely misses so it’s hard to play that way we have in the past. They have to get credit for that. They set good fields. It’s just an attritional style of cricket over here and they don’t allow it. It’s not as easy to score quickly.
“They’re a very, very good side. It was always going to be tough coming up here and they were the favourites going into it, and they’ve proven why they were. They’ve played very, very well and made it very hard for us. We’ve been slightly short of our best, but a lot of credit has to go to them. They’ve not allowed us to be our best.”
Crawley’s 85 was perhaps his most restrained in Test cricket. “I was just trying to ‘see ball, hit ball’ really. It wasn’t on purpose that I went a bit slower. They bowled well, they didn’t give me a lot early. I was just trying to play the ball on its merits and I certainly didn’t change my technique.
“I don’t listen to any outside noise and that helps. I feel like I was seeing the ball pretty well before Perth and two ducks doesn’t change that. I played two pretty average shots, but that doesn’t change that I felt in good nick. I just tried to stick with that and play the same way and I’ve wanted more from myself and I wanted more today, I wanted more in Brisbane. I always want bigger scores that are going to change the course of the game. While I batted nicely today, I haven’t managed to do that, which is disappointing.”
With England now staring at series defeat before Christmas in just 11 days of active cricket, Crawley was blunt in his assessment of where the two teams stand. “They’ve been better than us.
“A lot of the time, especially in England, we look internally and go: ‘Oh, what could we have done better?’ But they haven’t allowed us to. They’ve played really well. We could have been better, that’s a given, but they’re a top team in their own conditions and they’ve made it hard for us.”
