Brisbane, Nov 29 (IANS) England captain Ben Stokes has pushed back against suggestions that his side carried an air of arrogance during the first Ashes Test against Australia in Perth, insisting that saying this was ‘a little bit too far’.
A bruising two-day defeat in the opening Ashes Test in Perth last week has put England under huge criticism for a variety of reasons: their pre-series build-up, reckless batting choices and the contentious call to rest first-choice players from this weekend’s pink-ball warm-up game in Canberra.
Add to it, former Australia fast bowler Mitchell Johnson also described England as ‘arrogant’. “Look, you can call us rubbish, call us whatever you want. We didn’t have the Test match that we wanted to.”
“We were great in passages of that game… but I think arrogant might be a little bit too far. But that’s okay. We’ll take the rough with the smooth. I’d rather words like ‘rubbish’, but ‘arrogant’, I’m not so sure about that,” Stokes told reporters on Saturday, as England resumed their training for the second Test to be played with a pink ball.
He also acknowledged the criticism over not sending many first choice players for the warm-up game against PM’s XI. “But there’s obviously a lot more to it than just that. There’s where it is, in Canberra, which is a different state from Brisbane. The conditions are going to be completely different to what we are going to have coming up.”
“You take all the factors into consideration, the pros and cons, whatever it may be. We then discuss that and decide what we think is the best preparation. We have a few more days off than we planned after that Test. We had to go away and ask how we use these next few days wisely in order to be prepared for what it will be like in Brisbane.”
“We schedule everything as if the Test match is going to go five days. It didn’t go five days, so we had three days planned for training, and that obviously had to change. That’s why now we have a longer build-up for this pink-ball game,” elaborated Stokes.
Stokes further admitted his side must handle pressure more effectively but stood firm behind their attacking philosophy. “Could we have been better at executing what we wanted to do? Definitely. But again we’ve got a mindset of playing the game which is looking to put the opposition under pressure, while also trying to absorb that.”
“Sometimes when you go out there and you make a decision, it doesn’t always play out or work in the way that you want it to. And that’s what the key for the rest of this tour is, is making sure that we stay true to our beliefs of how we play our cricket. But also, we do know that we could have definitely been a lot better in certain areas throughout that Test match,” he added.
–IANS
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