Ashes 2025-26 - Ben Stokes - Calling England arrogant is a step too far

Ben Stokes is willing to accept criticism of England’s performance in the first Test as “rubbish” but feels labelling his side “arrogant” is a step too far.

Australia’s victory in Perth has seen the tourists come under heavy fire, after succumbing to defeat inside two days. Despite holding a strong position on day two – 105 in front, with nine second innings wickets in hand – England capitulated, losing 9 for 99 through questionable shot selection, before Travis Head completed the rout for an eight-wicket victory.

With an 11-day gap between the end of the first and the start of the second Test at The Gabba next Thursday, there has been ample space for postmortems, particularly in the Australian media. Publications and pundits have lined up to take shots at not just England’s approach in the match, but around it, too. Mitchell Johnson was the latest former Australian cricketer to seek his pound of flesh with his column on Friday. Such critiques have also come from the UK.

A lack of an intense warm-up ahead of the series, with a three-day match against the Lions at Lilac Hill, has been followed by a decision for all but three unused squad members to miss the Prime Ministers’ XI match in Canberra this weekend – a two-day pink-ball fixture ahead of Brisbane’s day-night Test. Factor in paparazzi shots of the team playing golf and an unflattering picture has been painted of an unserious team not committing wholly to one of the most anticipated Ashes tours in recent history.

Stokes, however, was keen to set the record straight in England’s first official media engagement since the end of the Perth Test. Prior to an additional training session at Allan Border Field on Saturday morning – the first of five ahead of the second Test – England’s Test captain ceded they must wear what comes their way, but stressed 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.”

Stokes also defended England’s decision not to send more of their first-string to join the Lions for the PM’s XI match, which starts on Saturday afternoon. Only Jacob Bethell, Josh Tongue and Matthew Potts are at Manuka Oval, with the remainder of the Ashes squad in situ in Brisbane since Wednesday.

It left Lions captain Tom Haines in the uncomfortable position of fielding questions from local media on Friday at the captain’s press conferences, asking if England had disrespected the match – and by association – prime minister Anthony Albanese.

“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.”

Saturday’s session lasted close to three hours before rain arrived in Brisbane. The week has been punctuated by thunderstorms, with more expected in the next few days that could hamper both team’s preparations and the Test itself although the forecast does become more settled.

Regardless of the weather, Australia will be seen as the dominant force coming into next week. They boast an impressive 13 wins from 14 in day-night Tests, suffering their first defeat against West Indies at the Gabba in 2024. Mitchell Starc, fresh from 10 wickets in the first Test, is the standout with the pink ball, with 81 dismissals at an average of 17.08.

With the odds stacked against England, Stokes issued a rallying cry to his team – and supporters – as he seeks to right the wrongs of Perth.

“We did some amazing things in that Test match,” he said. “The way we bowled in the first innings, and we were [effectively] 100 for 1, and put a score on the board that we felt was definitely defendable. We all know, and have looked back on it, that there were moments in that game where we could have been a lot better to help us gain even more of an advantage.

“The important thing we need to do as a team and individuals is learn from it. We have identified those moments, spoken about them as a group, that’s what we need to do. In terms of execution, could we have been better at executing what we want to do, definitely. But again, we have a mindset of playing the game which is looking to put the opposition under pressure, but also absorbing pressure.

“Sometimes when you go out there and make a decision, it doesn’t always pay off, or work the way you want it to. That’s the key for the rest of this tour, staying true to the beliefs of how we play our cricket. But also we do now we could have been a lot better in certain ways.

“We know that there’ll be a lot of disappointed fans in England after that first defeat. But it’s a five-game series, we’ve got four games to go, we’ve lost the first one – we’re absolutely desperate to come home with that goal from before we even started the series, which is to win the Ashes.”

Vithushan Ehantharajah is an associate editor at ESPNcricinfo

Source link-