After an undefeated home summer, England’s greatest challenge will be keeping the good thing they’ve got going during what head coach Jon Lewis describes as a “tricky” time before launching their T20 World Cup campaign.
England won 13 of their 14 fixtures – with a wash-out the only exception – against Pakistan and New Zealand during a home international season which is already over in mid-July, illustrating the volume of cricket on a 2024 international schedule featuring men’s and women’s T20 World Cups.
Just as England men begin – they are one match into a Test series against West Indies with Tests against Sri Lanka and two white-ball series with Australia to follow – the women have finished, their only competitive cricket left before the T20 World Cup in Bangladesh in October being the Hundred and a tour of Ireland which is unlikely to feature many, if any, tournament squad members.
“My preference would be we get on the plane tomorrow,” Lewis admitted at Lord’s, after his side’s 20-run victory secured a 5-0 sweep of the T20Is against New Zealand on Wednesday. “But we don’t. We’ve got eight weeks between now and then. That’s a tricky period for us to manage.
“I’ve just spoken to the players there in the dressing room and talked to them about my desire for them to go out and dominate the Hundred and actually show what brilliant players they are. Having a different captain, a different coach, a different coaching team giving different messages and then trying to make sure that they’re able to continue to do the things that we’ve been working on as well at the same time is really tricky for the players.”
Lewis couldn’t put his finger on exactly what had clicked between England’s sometimes scrappy wins against Pakistan, whom they beat 2-0 and 3-0 in T20s and ODIs respectively, and their more clinical displays against the White Ferns, who also lost the ODI series 3-0.
It could be a simple case of eradicating some winter rust and building confidence as individuals and as a team. There has also been marked improvement in consistency among the batting line-up and skill level in the field.
England’s world-class spin attack of Sophie Ecclestone, Charlie Dean and Sarah Glenn, the player of the series with eight wickets at an average of 6.87 and economy rate of 4.34, have imposed themselves on the opposition while the seam ranks are starting to see the benefits of Lauren Bell‘s remodelled action, Lauren Filer’s growing experience and Freya Kemp‘s return from a back injury.
Back to playing her allrounder role, Kemp also impressed with the bat, particularly during the pivotal 3rd T20I in Canterbury where she supported fellow teenager Alice Capsey‘s unbeaten 67 with an eight-ball cameo of 16 not out as England took an unassailable lead in the closest match of the series.
“We’ve batted 360 degrees of the ground during this series and hit boundaries all around the ground and most of our players can access all the areas of the ground, I want that to continue,” Lewis said.
“Our fielding has improved. I think New Zealand came over here and when they started this, in the 50-over series, were a better fielding side than us and over the course of the last three or four weeks we’ve really improved our fielding, from probably quite unlikely places, places that you wouldn’t expect.
“People like Sarah Glenn for example, when I turned up here, we were hiding her in the field and now she’s making an impact, taking diving catches and diving stops all over the place. That’s someone that really has been able to shift their game forward in the field, but also our athleticism and our physicality is getting better. That happens when you have a group of young players and they’re all developing really fast.
“All our bowling attack is pretty much, with the exception of Nat [Sciver-Brunt], 25 and under. We had two teenagers finishing the game off at Canterbury the other day, which it is really exciting. I feel that English cricket is in really safe hands for a long period of time to come.”
But Lewis has also noticed a sense of calm and growing confidence within a group that he says is playing more intelligent cricket than before. “The hardest job for now is that the players will leave us for a four-week period and they’ll go into situations that are the same but different and so at times their confidence can go up and it can go down,” he said.
“What we hope is we get back a group of players that are as confident as they are now leaving us when they come back to us. That’s not guaranteed. We’re going to have to work really hard when they come back to us to try and rebuild some people, but also to keep some people level and calm.
“We know that there’s bigger challenges ahead. The conditions will be the biggest challenge in Bangladesh and understanding how to play those the best. The team that plays the conditions the best over in Bangladesh will win that tournament.”
To teach that sense of calm and how to deal with different conditions, Lewis told his squad he was going to try and disrupt them during New Zealand’s visit. England played around with selection, rested experienced players – including captain Heather Knight in Canterbury – and altered batting and bowling roles to keep players on their toes.
But for the most part, Lewis believes it was the fear of the unknown that was most valuable. “I just told them there would be distractions: that’s a distraction in itself,” he said with a grin. “They’re waiting, ‘what’s going to happen?’ They’re not sure what’s going to happen, so that creates pressure, it creates anxiety, creates thinking.
“I didn’t really do too much to be honest, apart from telling them that. If you sow the seed then people generally overthink things… We got stuck on the bus today. I didn’t plan that. That in itself is a distraction. People were talking about getting off the bus and getting the tube to get here to make sure they can get their practice in before the game.
“You just try and raise the level of anxiety within the group to a place where they were able to bring themselves back into a calm place and communicate well with each other and talk their way through situations.”
The Hundred, starting on July 23, looms as another distraction. How players navigate it could go some way to informing how England show up for the World Cup.
