England’s head coach admits Australia are faster, more agile and more powerful
England’s head coach admits Australia are faster, more agile and more powerful
Share:
England head coach Jon Lewis accepts his side cannot match Australia for athleticism, speed or power, pointing to a “cultural difference” between the nations. Concerns over the England team’s general fitness and conditioning were first raised by World Cup winner turned commentator Alex Hartley, who subsequently claimed she had been “hung out to dry” and refused interviews as a result of her comments.
But, after losing all five Women’s Ashes matches so far to run up a painful and unassailable 10-0 deficit in the multi-format series, Lewis accepted there was a mismatch when it came to physical prowess between the rival teams. Yet he also suggested that was not the sole reason for the unexpected scale of their defeat.
“I would say, yeah, they’re a much more athletic team than us, they’re more agile, they look faster, at times they look more powerful,” he said ahead of Saturday’s third T20 in Adelaide. “Is that the reason that we’re not winning cricket matches here in this country? No.
“We definitely need to get faster and we can access more power for sure. If you’re talking about whether or not we can run marathons, we don’t need to. We need to be fit for purpose. “I think their discipline and their skill level has been higher. It’s an area of the game that we work on continually – all of our players do – and work really hard on it.”.
Assessing the reason for the fitness standards of the Australian team, he took a wider view. “I walked from Bondi to Coogee the other Sunday morning and pretty much the whole of the eastern suburbs of Sydney were out swimming in the sea and running and walking,” he said.
