With the Ben Stokes led England team winning the Boxing Day Melbourne Test in the Ashes by four wickets against hosts Australia, it was only the first time since 2011 that England won a Test in Australia. With the Melbourne Test also being the third shortest Test in Australia in terms of balls bowled with the Test ending in less than two days, England’s win meant that the England side now trails the Ashes 1-3 going into the fifth and final Test at Sydney Cricket Ground. Former England captain Michael Vaughan has termed England’s win at Melbourne as a ‘complete lottery’ and believes England need to win a strong game of cricket in Australia.
“I think it’s a massive game for England (in Sydney). It’s nice to win a game of cricket, but let’s be honest, it was a complete lottery in Melbourne. It wasn’t a proper game of Test match cricket. For the future and for this management in particular, they need to win a strong game of cricket here … that’s not a two-dayer,” Vaughan told The Sydney Morning Herald.
Since Brendon McCullum took over the coach of the England side, the team has won 25 Test matches out of 44 Test matches. With the side scoring 14 Test wins in the first 19 Tests under McCullum’s coaching, the results have been mediocre in the last two years with the team losing in 13 Tests as compared to wins in 11 Tests. After losing the first three Tests in this year’s Ashes, McCullum’s England side scored their first win of the current Ashes series with a four-wicket win at Melbourne last week. With the talks happening about the tactics of the team under McCullum apart from Stokes’s captaincy, Vaughan believes that England would need a solid display at Sydney and if the team gets pummelled by the hosts at Sydney, the need of having honest conversation about the captain and coach will arise. “For this management to carry on, the likes of Ben (Stokes) and Baz (Brendon McCullum) – I’m pretty sure they will carry on – but I think they need a good week for that to be absolutely rock solid. There’s a huge appetite within the group to keep [McCullum] on. But fundamentally, if they get pummelled in Sydney, there needs to be some honest conversations,”
England had opted for Jacob Bethell in place of Ollie Pope in the Melbourne Test. Pope, who had scored a total of 125 runs at an average of 20.83 in the first three Tests, was dropped for the Boxing Day Test. With pacer Josh Tongue bagging the man of the match award at Melbourne, there were also questions about why the pacer did not start in all the four Tests in the series. Vaughan also shared how ‘chopping and changing’ is not necessarily the right thing for English cricket. “I think chopping and changing is not necessarily the right thing for English cricket. Whatever happens at the end of this tour, they’ve got to accept that they got a lot of things wrong. If they’re going to be so stubborn to think that they were a bit unlucky, or things didn’t quite go the way they wanted … Well, we have a problem going forward. The key is maturity and that’s the one thing that I think this team can be a lot better at, in terms of the way they play and talk. If they can accept that, I have no problem with the management staying the same,” Vaughan concluded.
