England Test skipper Joe Root said that his team will take the loss in the Gabba Test on the chin and move on to the second Test in Adelaide where they will try to come up with a better response.
Opting to bat first, Root’s men were bundled out for 147 courtesy of a PatCummins-fifer. Australia then went on to make 425 with Travis Head leading the way scoring a blistering 152. England’s second innings saw a much better fight but another collapse meant that a target of 20 was set which was chased down in a jiffy.
“We’re a team that’s always responded well to situations like this in the recent past. We’re not scared of a challenge. We’re not scared of fronting up to a difficult result and we’ll just have to make sure that we do exactly that again on this occasion,” Root told BT Sport after the match.
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“The toss, I think it was the right decision, but when you’re 40 [29] for 4, it’s very difficult to get yourself back in the game from that position. We have to be better in that first innings and manage those conditions in that situation better moving forward and ultimately as well, we created so many chances with the ball. I thought we were excellent with the ball in hand,” Root added.
We created a lot of chances but we’ve to take them – Joe Root
The England team whiffed as many as five catches and two runouts in Australia’s first innings which was capitalized on by the hosts. There was also a moment of madness when Ben Stokes knocked over David Warner off his fourth ball but replays showed he had overstepped. Warner went on to make 94 and more importantly, build a match-defining partnership with Marnus Labuschagne.
Nathan Lyon dismissed Dawid Malan to pick his 400th Test wicket in the first Ashes Test in Brisbane. Credits: Twitter
“I thought our seamers were brilliant, Woody [Mark Wood] in particular, Robbo [Ollie Robinson] as well, and [they were] backed up by the other guys. We created a lot of chances but we’ve just got to take them.
“We want to be better in the field. If we did that the game could have looked very different: we could have been looking at – even with the way that we played this morning – we could have been 150 ahead and it’s a very different context of the game then,” Root added.
The 9-wicket defeat will be a tough pill to swallow but England will take heart from the fact that there were minor silver linings that they can take heading into the Adelaide Test.
