After contentious comments from Joe Root following his side’s humiliating defeat in the second Test, England legend Michael Vaughan has torched the touring team’s efforts this series.
Speaking after Australia took a 2-0 series lead from a dominant performance in Adelaide, Root faulted his bowlers for not bowling at a full enough length.
“If we’re being brutally honest, we needed to bowl fuller,” he said.
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“As soon as we did in that second innings, we created chances.”
Vaughan agreed with Root’s assertion but the former captain then teed off on England’s Ashes tour.
“They’ve got to be honest. So far the only thing they’ve done right on this trip is turn up, is turn up on time,” he told Fox Cricket.
“They’ve got pretty much everything wrong. Selections, tactics have not quite been right.”
Vaughan was astonished by the decision to omit veteran fast bowler Stuart Broad from the line-up, having already been left out of the team in Brisbane.
“Stuart Broad should be playing here, he should have played in Brisbane. How Stuart Broad is not going to be bowling here around the wicket to David Warner on a green top… I just can’t fathom that,” he said.
“They’re under pressure, the whole set-up is under pressure.
“In the first two matches, they’ve just been too nice. In the field, they’ve had no body language, no energy.
“I want to see some energy in the field, and I want to see a team that’s willing to try [to] have a little bit of a pop at Australia.”
Taking a right of reply with a column in the UK Telegraph, teammate and bowler James Anderson shared Root’s view on England’s bowlers.
“From a bowler’s point of view you want to be hitting the right lengths all the time,” he wrote.
“We did our best on the first two days to do that. I thought Australia left well and maybe we could have gone a touch fuller at times but we still created quite a few chances that were not taken.
“We have to be better at assessing it during a game. We can’t just go after the game, ‘We should have bowled fuller’.
“If we are bowling too short, at lunch we need information back saying we need to push our lengths up. We have to be a bit more proactive at that too as a whole group.”
Anderson then went on to redirect part of the blame to the team’s batters, suggesting the order was collapsing far too easily.
“We did not bat well enough on a pitch where the data said it was one of the flattest Adelaide surfaces ever produced and the pink ball did the least it has ever done in a day-night game,” he added.
“Look at the numbers. They show both sides bowled similar lengths. They did not bowl any fuller than us. But it is a case of the difference in techniques of the batters. It must be because they took 20 wickets and we didn’t.”
England’s batting woes continued this morning with their new opening partnership of Haseeb Hameed and Zak Crawley disseminating after just 14 balls.
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