For this ardent supporter of England cricket, men’s and women’s, it was a day both exhilarating on the one hand and profoundly frustrating on the other, to be reduced to shouting at the television: “There’s two there, for Chrissakes.”
Two semi-finals and two outcomes poles apart from one another. Eoin Morgan’s side, raising their game to a new level, are making their way to Eden Gardens in Kolkata for a final on Sunday in front of 80,000 spectators. By then, Charlotte Edwards and her team will already be home, no doubt wondering what might have been. If the men had been outstanding, learning and improving match by match, then the women, at a time when they needed to crank their game up a notch or two, were for three-quarters of their game, dismal.
Maybe the occasion got to them but, aside from a period when Edwards and Tammy Beaumont were together adding 67 for the first wicket to have things seemingly in control, Australia ran the match without ever quite reaching the heights themselves.
The aftermath was telling. Normal practice is for the captains to appear for post-match press conferences but this time, Mark Robinson, the England coach, broke the protocol by accompanying Edwards and sitting alongside her. However, any notion this was merely a sympathetic gesture of support for a beaten and drained captain were dispelled quickly enough as Robinson took charge of the proceedings while Edwards sat in silence, head down, looking grim.
He offered some mitigation for the performance and held up his “warrior” captain as someone of real substance who even at her advanced cricket age of 36 has shown the capacity and drive to enhance her game. But the subtext was scathing. He was there to tell it as it is, and I don’t believe I have ever heard such a withering assessment of a losing side by a coach without the dust having first settled. But here was someone in charge who quite clearly was not going to allow the occasion to pass simply with inevitable platitudes about being beaten by the better team on the day and so on. Some described it as “bizarre” but it was, to be honest, rather refreshing, even if it made redundant the journalists’ perennial post-press conference mutual query of “what’s the line”?
None of this should come as a surprise, though. When the England women played so poorly against Australia last summer, it was evident that, professionals as they now were with their central contracts, they had yet to adapt to the concept beyond its novelty. The dominance they had shown in previous years was down in part to their own excellence but also to the relative paucity of the competition.
Since then, while England’s progress had stalled, other countries, finally starting to invest in their women’s teams, are catching up. What England needed, I wrote at the time, was a “kick-arse coach”, someone who would demand standards that may seem anathema in a cosy world where places had almost become a sinecure.
Fitness would be a key issue, and with it the standard of fielding, once a strength, had to go not just to past levels but to new higher ones. Power-hitting had to improve and bowling skills be enhanced. A complete upgrade, in other words.
There would be a culture shock, I opined, which some may find hard to take. The appointment of Robinson, someone whose name was in the mix when the England men’s coach job became vacant, was high-profile and an indication the ECB head of women’s cricket, Clare Connor, herself disgruntled by the events of last summer, meant business.
Some things have improved since his appointment. Edwards continues to set a benchmark in a willingness to learn new skills and the judgment in recalling Beaumont and putting her at the top of the order, whence she hit four of England’s six sixes in the tournament, was a good one. Robinson has encouraged expansion with the bat into uncharted areas, although not quite the judgment to go with it if the flaccid dismissal of Sarah Taylor is anything to go by. Taylor, incidentally, arguably the most gifted of all women cricketers, has had another dismal ICC tournament, perhaps the most frustrating thing of all.
The central point of Robinson’s post-match ire was directed at the fitness of his team, particularly the capacity to run at speed between the wickets. It was, he felt, a Catch-22 situation, in which, unable to hit boundaries owing to good bowling and well-drilled field placements, there was still the opportunity to keep the board ticking over nicely with compensatory twos, the kind of aggressive running that puts fielding sides under pressure.
Instead, the running was insipid, lacking in confidence or nous. Robinson’s frustration must have been immense. “We’ve got to get fitter,” he said as Edwards looked on. “They out-ran us. Athleticism is something you are given by God but aerobic fitness is something we’ve got to get better. We missed out on twos, and we’ve lost by one boundary. We’ve got to change our mindset and toughen up a bit.”
This may usefully include such fundamental things as knowing how to run the bat in, or the techniques of diving both in the field and into the crease.
It is not a difficult concept. The men, though, hit the ball paced with the primary intention of taking two runs, while the women tend to do so largely because their shots have failed to find the boundary. It is not the same thing. The learning process will start now. Robinson has been finding his way into the job but he knows now where he wants to head with this team and it will not be pretty for some.
More miles into legs; better beep-test scores demanded; dietary programmes alongside strength and conditioning. He will drive them hard and cast the net wider. Some will go but that goes with the territory of being a modern, professional cricketer. It is time to join the real world.
