Down under and out as England surrender Ashes
England captain Alastair Cook concedes his side were outplayed in every department as they surrendered the Ashes to Australia in Perth.
The hosts completed a 150-run win in Perth on the final afternoon – despite a maiden century from Ben Stokes – to go 3-0 up in the five match series and claim the urn for the first time since they inflicted a whitewash on Andrew Flintoff’s men four series ago.
Cook said: “We’ve been outskilled in all aspects. It’s hard to say that as a player but that’s the honest truth.
“We’ve got to keep looking at ourselves, keep doing what we can do which is work as hard as we can to turn things around.”
Cook insisted his side had not been taken by surprise by Australia.
Ruthless
“We knew what a good side they were in England,” he said. “Any side coming to Australia, you have to be at the top of your game to compete. We haven’t been there.
“They’ve been ruthless – ruthless in never letting us back in any game when they got ahead of us.
“But there’s a lot of talent in the dressing room. Everyone’s hurting now, it’s an incredibly tough place to be. That happens in sport – there’s a winner and a loser and at the moment we’re in the losing dressing room and it hurts.
“All we can do is work as hard as we can on our games and come out on Boxing Day and try and put in a better performance.”
Stokes’s 120 in 353 all out was at least a crumb of comfort to England.
Cook said: “It was a fantastic innings – full of character on a tough wicket with those cracks. It’s always daunting to see them. He put them out of his head and I thought it was an outstanding hundred.
“You never know in sport. That partnership was just starting to build. But, as always, just when we’ve got a partnership going we haven’t managed to continue.”
In notional pursuit of a world-record 504 to win, or in the hope of eking out England’s second innings for more than five sessions in all, Stokes deserved significant credit for delaying the inevitable for so long.
His skill and determination, in only his second test, were justly rewarded with a memorable and chanceless century.
Outplayed throughout
It was also England’s first of a series in which they have fallen badly short against hosts hell-bent on revenge after three successive Ashes defeats.
Cook’s tourists travelled down under perhaps in expectation rather than mere hope of beating their oldest adversaries again.
Instead, they have been outplayed throughout – and it was down almost single-handedly to 22-year-old Stokes that even a modicum of pride was salvaged here.
It has taken only 14 days of cricket, in fact, for Australia to win the Ashes for the first time since their 5-0 whitewash of Andrew Flintoff’s team six winters ago.
England’s only remaining business down under this time is to avoid a repeat of that ignominy, by somehow battling back in Melbourne on Boxing Day and Sydney in the new year.