Joe Root defended his decision to bat first at the Gabba after England slumped to a chastening nine-wicket defeat in which they lost their last eight wickets for 77 runs in 30.1 overs.
The England captain, who is still searching for his first century on Australian soil, admitted that there were “harsh lessons that we’ve learnt through this match”.
“Credit to Australia, they’ve taken every chance that’s come their way and I can’t say the same about ourselves,” Root said after his side had been outplayed for all bar two sessions of the match.
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Root had made a controversial call on the first morning to bat first on a green pitch under cloudy skies. “I think batting first was the right decision,” he said after the match. “Being 40 for four makes it look like that’s not the case. If we had got even 250 in that first innings and the game looks very different altogether.”
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It wasn’t only the toss decision that was called into question. England had gone into the match without James Anderson and Stuart Broad for the first time in five years. Another decision which the captain was forced to defend after the end of the match. “In terms of selection, I wanted a balanced attack,” he said. “I wanted to be able to change the momentum of the game and we went in with a spinner.”
It was not a gamble that paid off, though, as Jack Leach was taken apart in a pre-planned assault by the Australian top order either side of lunch on the second day and England’s performance in the field was hampered by some poor catching.
“Credit to Australia, they took on Leachy,” Root added. “He had to bowl on that wicket at its worst and I was slilghtly too aggressive with his fields early on. It made it very difficult for him.
“I thought our seamers were brilliant. [Mark] Wood in particular and [Ollie] Robinson as well and they were backed up by the other guys. We created a lot of chances but we’ve just got to take them. We want to be better in the field. If we did that the game could have looked very different, we could have been looking at — even with the way that we played this morning — we could have been 150 ahead and it’s a very different context of the game then.
“Our bowlers were excellent. They beat the bat a huge amount of times. They banged out the areas that want to on this kind of wicket but we have just got to be better in the field.”
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England now have selection decisions to ponder before the second Test, which begins on Thursday at 4am GMT. A day/night Test is a different prospect and there will almost certainly be changes to the make-up of the bowling.
Having gone behind down in the series, they will now try to overcome 67 years of history and become the first England side since Frank Tyson’s team in 1954-55 to come back from a 1-0 deficit and win the series in Australia. Root insists his squad are “not scared of a challenge” and have responded well to defeats in the past.
“We’re a team that has always responded well to situations like this in the recent past,” he said. “We’re not scared of fronting up to a difficult result and we’ll just have to make sure that we do exactly that again on this occasion.”
A difficult day got worse for England when they were penalised for a slow over rate. Root’s team were fined their entire match fee and docked five ICC World Test Championship points after they were judged to be five overs short of the target after time allowances were taken into consideration.
Travis Head, the man of the match, was fined 15 per cent of his match fee for breaching the ICC Code of Conduct article which relates to “use of an audible obscenity during an international match”.
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Of greater concern to Australia, however, will be the fitness of the opening batsman David Warner and fast bowler Josh Hazlewood.
Hazlewood was used sparingly in England’s second innings, bowling only 14 overs out of 103, and was suffering from an undisclosed injury. Warner suffered bruised ribs after taking a couple of blows from Ben Stokes and did not come out to bat as Australia chased down their 20-run target.
If as expected Australia decide not to risk Hazlewood, Jhye Richardson, the 25-year-old quick who was in contention to start the first Test ahead of Mitchell Starc, is the likely replacement, with Michael Neser another option.
“Joshy is a little bit sore, so we’ll see how he wakes up in the morning,” Pat Cummins, the Australia captain, said. “The key is we don’t want to put him in jeopardy for the whole series, so we’ll take our time.
“He had a scan last night and we’ll work through that. There’s no plan yet, we’ll sleep on it. It’s a five-Test series and he’s important for us, we didn’t want to blow him out of the water on day three.”
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“Davey was available to bat,” Cummins added. “We just chose not to risk him. I think he will be alright for Adelaide. He’s still pretty sore but we’ll monitor him and he should be fine.”
