Charlotte Edwards hopes that fitness doubts will be done with after her first month in charge of the England women’s team.
Charlotte Edwards hopes her banishing the ‘F-word’ will turn England’s image around.
Edwards provided some details about the improvements she has already sought to make, one month after she was named head coach in lieu of Jon Lewis, who was fired due to the team’s dismal performances at the most recent T20 World Cup and Ashes.
At the forefront were shifting public perceptions of the team and the necessity of playing more domestic cricket, with selection going forward being performance-based, as she declared in her maiden news conference as England Women’s head coach at Lord’s on April 2.
“We’ve got to look at our professional behaviours and how we go about stuff and that’s everything across the board,” Edwards said. “Social media, we talked very openly about the perception of the team at the moment and we’ve got to change people’s perceptions.
“But we’ve got to earn the right to do that and we’ve got to stop putting stuff on social media that doesn’t need to be on there. If it’s not going to positively reflect on them or us as a group, then it probably is not worth posting. But equally I want them to be themselves because that’s really important to me.”
Following a clumsy loss to the West Indies in their most recent group match at the T20 World Cup in Dubai, where social media images from a day-off boat trip also sparked concern, England has come under fire for their lack of fitness.
As the pitch was revealed as the location for the T20 World Cup final on July 5, 2026, Edwards was back at Lord’s on Thursday to speak to reporters. She had promised to evaluate the group’s fitness levels for herself a month prior. She thought about how those perceptions differed from her reality after working with them for a few weeks at their national performance facility in Loughborough.
“Well, it was clear from the winter, I mean, I call it the F-word,” she said. “I said at my press conference, ‘I’ll go and judge that for myself’. I was so impressed by the standards in terms of where everyone was at. They’ve clearly worked very hard from the period after the Ashes. That is an area, but it’s one part of performance and had we won, that doesn’t get brought into question. So we’ve equally got to keep working really hard there.
“But the cricket and getting our game-plan is more important to me. I think that’s where they lost a lot of their games was through their cricket awareness. And what I want to instil in this group is that we’re really smart about how we play the game – we know when to be aggressive, we know when not to be, we play every game to win. Bottom line, big tournaments are about winning and it’s creating an environment so we can do that more consistently and having a game-plan to do that.”