Based on the past few series, if you ask anyone who has watched the English women play about their major weakness, you will get only one answer, and that is facing the spinners.
In the recently concluded T20I series, England lost a total of 24 wickets, losing a whopping 17 wickets to the spinners. To put things into perspective, English batters lost 70% of their wickets to the spinners. The likes of Kavisha Dilhari, Chamari Athapaththu, Inoka Ranaweera, and Inoshi Priyadarshini completely outclassed the English batters throughout the series.
To improvise on their mistakes, the English thinktank has decided to send a few batters to Mumbai keeping in mind the series against India next year, as well as the next 2 World Cups (2024 ICC T20 World Cup in Bangladesh and 2025 ICC World Cup in India).
The pitches in the Indian subcontinent tend to support spinners more than the usual pacers unlike what we see in the countries like England, Australia, and New Zealand.
After losing the series 1-2 against Sri Lanka, head coach Jon Lewis said, “Off the back of the Ashes, and from what I saw at the World Cup, it’s pretty clear that the way we play spin bowling is a big area for development for us.”
Even in the historic Ashes series, England lost a total of 65 wickets across formats, while 39 (60%) of those were taken by the spinners. All these matches were played in England, so to even imagine that the batters are getting dismissed to spinners on pace-friendly wickets in England is a hard task.
If England wants to have any sort of a chance at the upcoming World Cups, they have to massively improve in this aspect.
Lewis further added, “We’ve got a 20-over World Cup in Bangladesh, we’ve got a tour to India and we’ve got a 50-over World Cup in India. So our next three big challenges in reality, there’s going to be a lot of spin bowled at us. People will watch us play spin and they’ll go, ‘Right, okay, we think we can exploit this team in that area.”
Lewis hasn’t mentioned which players or how many players will be a part of this camp, but he has confirmed that it will start before the English players go to Australia for the WBBL.
(Quotes sourced from ESPN Cricinfo and IANS)
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