Beaten captain Ben Stokes has made it clear there is no room for “weak men” on England’s faltering Ashes tour.
Stokes’ side are 2-0 down with three to play after another deeply flawed performance in Brisbane and find themselves up against it on one of cricket’s most fierce trips.
Coming off the back of a two-day thrashing in Perth, there are serious question marks over the ability of his England team to react to the big occasion and time is running out for them to find an appropriate answer.
Stokes did his best to instil some fighting spirit on the fourth and final day at the Gabba, batting for almost four hours in a doomed show of defiance that put a flighty top order to shame, and had strong words afterwards.
“There is a saying that we have said a lot here, that Australia is not for weak men,” he said, after seeing the hosts chase down a tiny target of 65 with eight wickets intact.
“Teams who come to Australia can’t be soft or weak, whatever it may be, because that’s how it is out here: it’s a tough place to come. You can’t come to Australia and be weak but you also can’t be in my dressing room if you are and there is none of that.
“We pick people on ability and skill but we also pick people on character and mentality. A few things obviously need to be addressed, I think, on that but deep down we’ve got characters who I know that can stand up to what we’ve got to do over the next three games.
“Nothing’s guaranteed in life and nothing’s guaranteed in sport but as long as you walk out there and think in your head, ‘I’m going to fight all the way to the end here’, that’s all you can focus on.”
England have blinked at key times in both games, collapsing in a flurry of loose strokes too frequently and failing to produce consistently threatening spells with the ball after a stirring start to the series.
It is a habit that has not escaped Stokes’ attention and one that will be squarely on the agenda as the squad depart for the coastal resort of Noosa prior to the third Test in Adelaide.
“There are moments in the game where the heat is on and the pressure is really, really cooking, where your character comes out more,” he said.
“Australia keep outdoing us in those moments. At the moment we’ve not been able to stand up to what they’ve thrown at us. When you know it’s not down to skill, you’ve probably got to dig a little bit deeper and find out what the thing is.
“We have all been guilty of it so far on this tour at moments, maybe letting the pressure, the occasion, the circumstances get to us in our decision making. The mental side of this game is tough.”
England have nine days to pick themselves up off the floor before hostilities resume and know they must now be almost perfect if they are to bring the urn back home with them in the new year.
Only one team in history, Donald Bradman’s Australian class of 1936-37, has ever overturned a 2-0 deficit to win a five-match series. England, meanwhile, have not won a single Test on Australian soil since 2010-11, losing 15 and drawing two.
Stringing together a hat-trick of victories at Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney is highly unlikely but not yet impossible.
“It’s a huge series that’s been built up for a long, long time; we still have the opportunity to do what we came out here to do,” said Stokes.
“If we lose hope we might as well not turn up. I haven’t lost hope, that dressing room hasn’t lost hope and I’ll be doing everything I can as a captain to ensure that everyone is as positive as they possibly can be.”
