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“Inspire and entertain”. Since he took over as England head coach in November 2022, that has been the mantra from Jon Lewis. Players have been encouraged to embrace and defend his philosophy, as Sophia Dunkley did in Sydney, after England surrendered the Ashes. “It’s important that we keep our eyes focused on how we want to play as a team and how we want to come across,” she said. In other words, you can lose the Ashes, but if you do it in spectacular Jon‑ball fashion, no one will mind too much. Well, here we are two weeks later at 16-0 and, funnily enough, people do seem to mind.
Perhaps if you’re Australian you might have been entertained by the sight of England fielding like clowns on day two of the Melbourne Test. Maybe if you were teaching a seminar on “1,000 ways to lose a cricket match”, you would have found watching England over the past three weeks inspirational. For everyone else, the “inspire and entertain” refrain now rings completely hollow. After all, the word “inspirational” in its literal sense means to “fill people with hope or encourage them”. Watching England mess up a run‑chase or fumble easy catches has precisely the opposite effect.
So, RIP Jon-ball, which died at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on 1 February 2025, deeply lamented by a large circle of sorrowing friends and acquaintances. It seems inevitable that Lewis will be the first victim of the England and Wales Cricket Board’s post‑series review. Any coach who tries to explain his team’s worst defeat in living memory by reference to Australia’s more favourable climate – rather than his own inability to bring the best out of his players – can no longer be taken seriously.
A thornier question is the future of the captain, Heather Knight. She is a World Cup‑winning leader and an admirable person, seen recently lending her support to the exiled Afghanistan women’s cricket team by showing up at their first match, only hours before the start of one of the biggest games of her own career. But there is no room for sentimentality here. Knight has now outlasted two coaches – it was Mark Robinson and Lisa Keightley respectively who were blamed for defeats in the 2019 and 2022 Ashes series – but there comes a time when she also has to face scrutiny.
That is especially true given that a team culture appears to have developed whereby some players feel it is acceptable to coast, rather than strive continuously to improve. The ECB’s managing director of women’s cricket, Clare Connor, acknowledged that Australia have “set new standards of athleticism” on this tour: “Our players will have to look at that level of athleticism and speed and power, and see that as a new benchmark.” But she and other senior executives at the ECB also have to accept some culpability.
The ECB’s recent decision to award two-year contracts to a select group of players – Lauren Bell, Charlie Dean, Sophie Ecclestone, Amy Jones, Nat Sciver-Brunt, Danni Wyatt-Hodge and Knight – reinforced the impression that this England team is a closed shop, and that certain players are undroppable. That is the real reason why Ecclestone felt able to refuse to do a TV interview with Alex Hartley with such impunity.
Asked in November about Knight’s future, Lewis suggested strongly that she would choose the time of her own departure (“there’ll be a natural point where Heather feels ‘I’ve done all I can to take this team as far as I can’”), but a captain who has overseen such a deterioration in team culture has forfeited that right. England’s focus needs to be ensuring they are competitive in the home T20 World Cup in 2026: that calls for a new captain who can enforce more rigorous standards and refuse to tolerate any excuses for not meeting them.
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Who should replace Knight? This is a difficult one because the entire leadership team have dodged succession planning for years. Sciver‑Brunt is vice‑captain, but gave a poor account of her abilities in the T20 World Cup against West Indies last year; Tammy Beaumont is not part of the T20 team, and rewarding Ecclestone with the captaincy, given everything, would hardly send the right message. England may need to accept that an interim captain, perhaps Dean, is needed for a year while they bring the obvious next-gen leader into the setup, the 21-year-old Grace Scrivens (announced recently as the new Essex captain), and allow her to find her feet.
It’s not ideal, but it is better than the ECB’s approach up to now of burying its head in the sand. England have been allowed to shrug off a string of previous defeats under Lewis: a T20 series loss against Sri Lanka, defeat by an innings against India, and a dreadful showing last October against West Indies in the World Cup. The silver lining to this catastrophic tour is that things have been so abjectly bad that this is no longer an option.
