Stokes leaps to team’s defense after being called arrogant for their decision to skip the pink-ball warm-up game.
Stokes: Calling England arrogant is a step too far.
Ben Stokes believes calling his team “arrogant” is going too far, but he is prepared to take criticism of England’s performance in the first Test as “rubbish.”
After losing in just two days, Australia’s triumph in Perth has drawn a lot of criticism. On day two, England was in a solid position, leading by 105 with nine wickets in the second innings. However, due to poor shot selection, they lost 9 for 99, and Travis Head finished the rout for an eight-wicket victory.
There has been plenty of time for postmortems, especially in the Australian media, with an 11-day break between the conclusion of the first Test and the commencement of the second at The Gabba on Thursday. Publications and commentators have lined up to criticise England’s strategy both during and after the game. With his piece on Friday, Mitchell Johnson became the most recent former Australian cricket player to try to get his share. The UK has also made similar criticisms.
All but three unused squad members will miss this weekend’s Prime Ministers’ XI match in Canberra, a two-day pink-ball match ahead of Brisbane’s day-night Test, due to a lack of an intense warm-up prior to the series, which includes a three-day match against the Lions at Lilac Hill. When you include paparazzi photos of the team playing golf, it paints an unfavourable impression of a careless team that isn’t fully committed to one of the most eagerly awaited Ashes tours in recent memory.
But at England’s first formal media appearance since the conclusion of the Perth Test, Stokes was eager to correct the record. England’s Test captain acknowledged that they must wear whatever comes their way before an additional training session at Allan Border Field on Saturday morning, the first of five before the second Test, but emphasised that not all of it was valid.
“Look, you can call us rubbish, call us whatever you want,” Stokes said. “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.”
“I do understand it,” said Stokes of the blowback to shunning the fixture. “We have a pink-ball match coming up in Brisbane, and we have an opportunity to play some pink-ball cricket. When you look at it just like that, I don’t want to say it makes sense, but I totally understand it [that view].
“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 of training, and that obviously had to change. That’s why now we have a longer build-up for this pink-ball game.”