Former Australia bowler Jason Gillespie says he would be more worried about the “robustness” of England’s pace attack than their batting frailties.
England’s all-pace attack of Jofra Archer, Gus Atkinson, Brydon Carse, Mark Wood and all-rounder Ben Stokes were lauded after the first innings in Perth, with former captain Michael Vaughan saying they were “as good as he’s seen”.
However, they struggled in the face of an onslaught from Travis Head in the second innings and paces were down, with Archer’s average speed dropping from 90.3mph to 87.6mph.
Head went on to hit a swashbuckling century and set up an eight-wicket win for Australia.
“England should take a lot of heart from their first innings bowling and we saw glimpses with the bat from Harry Brook and Jamie Smith of batting nice and positively and scoring a few runs,” Gillespie said on BBC World Service’s Stumped podcast.
“Everyone talks about England’s batting and it being aggressive – that will be hit and miss, it is inconsistent. When it is good, it is really good, when it is bad, it’s really bad.
“I would be more concerned about the robustness of the bowling attack – it was chalk and cheese from day one to day two and in particular Jofra Archer and Mark Wood.
“I know they had different bowling plans but it was interesting to see the pace was well down from the previous day and they hadn’t bowled a lot of overs.
“That would be my concern. Do they have enough work in the bank to be fit and strong enough to bowl consistently high pace across the course of a whole match and then back it up in the subsequent matches? That is the big question mark for me.”