The England women’s cricket team were touted as gold medal hopes at the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games. They didn’t even manage bronze. Heather Knight was ruled out on the eve of the tournament with a hip injury and the stand-in captain, Nat Sciver-Brunt, struggled to assert her authority: her wife, Katherine, was reprimanded for swearing on the field of play; England threw away their bronze-medal match against New Zealand; and Sophie Ecclestone was shown live on television knocking a chair over with her bat.
Why hark back to something that happened more than two years ago? Because England’s disastrous group-stage exit from the T20 World Cup, at the hands of West Indies, had eerie echoes of summer 2022. This time, Knight’s injury was a “popped calf” (her words), but it was once again the vice-captain, Sciver-Brunt, who was forced to step in when Knight couldn’t take the field.
Karl Marx once said: “History repeats itself – the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” If the Commonwealth Games were the tragedy, then the West Indies match was the farce: no chair smashing this time but, instead, England decided to field as if they had never seen a cricket ball before, much less known how to catch one. On both occasions Sciver-Brunt looked as if she were trapped in a hostage situation, desperate to be rescued from the torture of captaincy.
Some have blamed England’s defeat on a lack of team fitness, but three words from the head coach, Jon Lewis, offered a more convincing explanation: “We missed Heather,” he said. Sciver-Brunt, he admitted, had no idea how to respond to Qiana Joseph’s 38-ball, 52-run onslaught. “[Heather] might well have been able to help the bowlers more than Nat was able to in that situation,” he said. “I could see after six overs a lot of the players starting to drift off. We looked deflated.”
Lewis has talked a good game of late about building a “strategy group”: senior players whose role is to help decision making on the pitch. But talk is cheap. On Tuesday, with the England attack torn to pieces by Joseph, this group – which includes Ecclestone, Alice Capsey and Sarah Glenn – had no idea what plan B might be, or how to support Sciver-Brunt. Lewis had to take the unprecedented step of coming on to the pitch himself during the drinks break to try to restore order. It was already too late.
Captains get injured, it’s nobody’s fault. Just ask Australia – who suffered a shock defeat of their own in Thursday’s semi-final against South Africa, in the absence of their captain, Alyssa Healy. But compare Healy’s words post-match about her own understudy, Tahlia McGrath, to Lewis’s about Sciver-Brunt.
“T-Mac’s had the opportunity to captain in my absence before and done it outstandingly well,” Healy said. “I can’t fault the side at all in their optimism in taking on the challenge and going: ‘Great, I get an opportunity to do this, whether it’s opening the batting or captaining.’ That’s where I feel like the group’s in such a great place.” It puts England’s unhealthy overreliance on Knight’s leadership into perspective.
There has been no update on the seriousness of Knight’s “calf pop”, but let’s consider what would happen if she did – God forbid – sustain a career-ending injury. The truth is nobody knows who would succeed her – least of all Lewis. We know this because when he had the rare opportunity to blood a potential successor on England’s tour to Ireland in September, he opted instead to hand the reins to Kate Cross, who turned 33 this month. Even in the face of clear evidence of Sciver-Brunt’s reluctance to lead on a full-time basis, he took the easy way out and kept her on as vice-captain.
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It’s clear why Lewis has sidestepped the issue. Knight has captained this team – firmly cast in her mould – for more than eight years. Captaincy succession planning will require negotiating complex dynamics around levels of seniority, player cliques and potentially even looking outside the squad for a new leader.
On the other hand, it is the job of an England coach to take tough decisions. Lewis’s reluctance to do so has already cost England a place in Sunday’s World Cup final; if he isn’t prepared to step up to the plate now, then perhaps the time has come for him to consider his position.
