{"id":239947,"date":"2025-11-02T17:39:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-02T17:39:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/239947\/"},"modified":"2025-11-02T17:39:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-02T17:39:07","slug":"jofra-archer-and-mark-wood-give-england-a-lift-after-epic-odi-failure-england-cricket-team","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/239947\/","title":{"rendered":"Jofra Archer and Mark Wood give England a lift after epic ODI failure | England cricket team"},"content":{"rendered":"

And so to Australia. On Sunday Jofra Archer<\/a>, Mark Wood and other members of England\u2019s Ashes squad arrived in Perth, some flying from the white-ball tour of New Zealand and others from England with the Lions. The full group will not assemble for another week, with the players and coaches involved in the 3-0 one-day shellacking by the Black Caps now scattering for some much-needed decompression. There will be a lot of English accents on Kiwi golf courses over the next few days.<\/p>\n

One can only hope they strike that kind of white ball a little more cleanly than the ones with which New Zealand\u2019s bowlers have been torturing them of late. Take away Harry Brook\u2019s magnificent 135 in the first one-day international, which hauled England from the brink of total humiliation and transformed the game into a mere embarrassment, and in their other 14 innings the five batters now turning their attention to the Ashes scored 129 runs at an average of 9.21, the start of every innings a cavalcade of misery.<\/p>\n

In their final match, at Wellington\u2019s Sky Stadium on Saturday, England found themselves three down with 26 balls bowled and 17 runs on the board, a fitting conclusion to a series pockmarked by similarly epic failure. Amounting to just 58, the combined scores across the three games of Jamie Smith, Ben Duckett and Joe Root are precisely 50 fewer than the next-worst effort of England\u2019s top three in a series of three or more completed matches, the 108 in India in 1981-82.<\/p>\n

Add the contributions from No\u00a04, a position occupied by Jacob Bethell twice and Brook once, and the number rises very slightly to 84, 70 fewer than the next-worst effort in English history, when West Indies visited in 1976, and making them the worst-performing top four from any country in any comparable series ever, five away from Bangladesh\u2019s contribution to the 1988 Asia Cup. England have been bad before, but not like this.<\/p>\n

The gentle wave of optimism that followed news that Pat Cummins, probably Australia\u2019s best bowler, would miss at least the first Ashes Test<\/a> feels a little less refreshing given the performance of so many of England\u2019s key batters against a New Zealand team shorn of perhaps the finest five of theirs. Matt Henry was ruled out of two of the three games and Will O\u2019Rourke, Lockie Ferguson, Kyle Jamieson and Adam Milne, for various reasons, missed them all.<\/p>\n

Their batters may not have given England\u2019s bowlers much to work with, but the form and fitness of Archer and Brydon Carse, as well as the sight of Wood, Gus Atkinson and Josh Tongue gradually increasing their paces and workloads in training, has been hugely encouraging, even if the team\u2019s outstanding ODI performer by a distance was the one who had just announced his red-ball retirement<\/a>. Brendon McCullum described Jamie Overton as a \u201chuge win for the tour\u201d, saying: \u201cWe think he\u2019s a better player than what he does.\u201d The all-rounder suggested he was helped by the team\u2019s dire position each time he came out to bat \u2013 \u201cYou\u2019ve technically got nothing to lose\u201d \u2013 which perhaps means the top four contributed something after all.<\/p>\n

England\u2019s Mark Wood arrives at Perth airport, with the first Test against Australia on 21 November. Photograph: Paul Kane\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

McCullum may feel he doubts himself too much, but one thing Overton does have belief in, despite recent performances, is England\u2019s Test team. \u201cIt\u2019s a completely different side, a different format,\u201d he said. \u201cI still think the boys are going to go really well in Australia. They\u2019ve played great cricket in the last 18 months, two years, and you can rely on that, whereas this 50-over side, we\u2019ve struggled in the last 12 months. It\u2019s one of those things. Confidence can go both ways. The Test side is going really well so fingers crossed they can go well in the Ashes.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The first Test starts in a little under three weeks, long enough for memories of recent travails to fade a bit. \u201cI\u2019m proper excited,\u201d McCullum said of his next test (after the golf). \u201cWe\u2019re incredibly respectful of the challenge Australia is going to present us, we know how hard that tour is going to be. It\u2019s going to require a team to stay together right throughout, to be as strong as we can to try and block out any of the outside noise. We\u2019re very respectful of who we\u2019re coming up against, we\u2019re so excited to get over there and we can\u2019t wait to get\u00a0started.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"And so to Australia. On Sunday Jofra Archer, Mark Wood and other members of England\u2019s Ashes squad arrived…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":239948,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[1721,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-239947","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cricket","8":"tag-cricket","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239947"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239947\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/239948"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}