ICC Cricket World Cup 2023: How England Imploded From Defending Champions To Also-Rans

In a swift and bewildering fall from grace, England, the ruling kings of white-ball cricket, the side that won the last Men’s 50-over World Cup in 2019 and the T20 World Cup last year, found themselves in the unenviable predicament of having to win their last two group matches to avoid ending up as the wooden spooners of the 2023 ODI World Cup. (Cricket News | Full Coverage)

In the very first game of ICC Cricket World Cup 2023, New Zealand dented their pride and confidence with a thumping nine-wicket victory, reaching an imposing target of 283 with a whopping 14 overs to spare.

Afghanistan then rubbed salt into their wounds with an unexpected 69-run victory, similar to the one achieved by Ireland in the 2011 edition.

These two matches took the wind out of England’s sails and pushed them onto the backfoot even before they had properly marked out their guard in the tournament, and proved to be the precursor to a string of dismal performances that carried on into the crucial games against South Africa and Sri Lanka which they desperately needed to win, to stay afloat. Interestingly, arch-rivals Australia started off equally poorly, losing their first two games of the tournament as well. But how well they have regrouped and bounced back from there.

Not so, England.

With almost the same set of main players who play red-ball cricket, England seem to have abandoned the spectacular Bazball tactics that have brought them so much success there in recent times, and their batting went back into a tentative, defensive shell, not seen since the last Ashes series in Australia.

Simply put, they batted badly and a string of low scores just did not allow them to find their feet in this tournament. Barring Dawid Malan, who scored a hundred and three fifties, and to a certain extent Ben Stokes with a late 100 against Netherlands and a fifty, none of the others even remotely looked the part of belonging to one of the top international batting line-ups.

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Traditionally, whenever the England side has hit a downward spiral with its batting, it has gone deeper and deeper into the rut with hardly anyone standing up to stem the rot. It happened during the last Ashes tour to Australia, and it happened again in this World Cup.

Their batting, which has been so exciting in the breathtaking Bazball displays of recent times against some of the best bowling attacks of the world, was unbelievably tentative, and confidence dipped to its lowest ebb in the game against India, where they got bowled out for 129, chasing a modest 229.

England batters have always struggled on Indian tracks, and carry a deep-rooted suspicion of slow, low, turning Indian wickets, which seems to hold them in a vice-like grip mentally, causing a performance paralysis. And this is despite all the cricket that their players have played in India in recent years.

Cricket is no rocket science. The simple bottom line is: if you cannot put runs on the Board, you don’t win matches. Thrice, England strung up 300-plus totals - against Bangladesh, Netherlands and Pakistan - and thrice they won.

Unfortunately, that didn’t happened in the other matches and they lost badly. That in a nutshell, is the simple reason behind their downfall in this World Cup.

Their best batters regularly fell to first-ball ducks - Jonny Bairstow, Joe Root and Jos Buttler going first ball in horror starts from which the team never recovered. There has been a collective lack of character in the batting, where no one has stepped up to take charge, as the very same Bairstow and Root and Stokes and Harry Brook have so often done in the recent past, in the red-ball format. 

Though that format may be different, the basic principles of commitment and mental toughness to stick to the task and believe in oneself remain the same. That fighting mindset and never-say-die spirit, so spectacularly showcased by Glenn Maxwell, was completely missing in this team, which at times resembled a set of dazed, worn-out zombies, going through the motions.

Whether too much cricket is a contributory factor, is a point of contention that needs closer examination since most international cricketers barring a few, are now playing similar amounts of cricket and chasing similar amounts of money.

Their preparation leading up to the tournament could be a more relevant factor, as they chose to take a break before the World Cup when the other teams were all hard at work, playing practice games, and shoring up their mental and physical preparedness for the World Cup. England, on the other hand, chose to come into the tournament off a rest, and by the time they got back their match sharpness (if they ever did!), they had lost important matches and sunk into an abyss from which there was no recovery.

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The defending champions in both the 50-over and T20 World Cups, coupled with their recent good showings in Test cricket, came into this showpiece event perhaps a wee bit complacent and overconfident in the abilities of their stars to adjust and pick up from where they had left off. Some of their key players - Jonny Bairstow, Joe Root, Mark Wood, Ben Stokes and Liam Livingstone - had not played a 50-over game for more than a year when they turned up at the Narendra Modi Stadium for the first match against New Zealand.

The assumption that they would click into the right gear straightaway, proved spectacularly wrong.

While England were taking their pre-tournament breather, Australia were playing a three-game series in India and most of the New Zealand squad was in Bangladesh. India, who won all their group games, played 30 ODIs in the 12 months leading up to the World Cup, and nine in the three weeks of September before the tournament, as the side eased into top mental and physical preparedness.

And it showed.

In the first match against New Zealand where they put up a decent score batting first, the England bowlers lost the plot and did not know what hit them, as Devon Conway and Rachin Ravindra tore into them. Had they managed to win that game, who knows whether this would have been a different story?

Then came the Afghanistan match, which thrust them deeper into the negative rut, and then the match against Sri Lanka, all shock defeats from which they never recovered.

In the game against Australia, they again had the by-now familiar horror start, as Jonny Bairstow departed for nought off the first delivery from Mitchell Starc. Bairstow’s dismissal was symbolic of the kind of tournament England had, struggling, right from the word go. 

It was the same story in the match against India, where both Stokes and Root failed to score a run in a batting card that did not have a single decent effort worth showing. They collapsed abjectly after a decent bowling effort and were never seriously in the game.

That was the story of England’s batting in this tournament with the big guns repeatedly failing to fire in crucial games, burdening a brittle batting order with too many one-ball dismissals at the top. Bairstow, Buttler, Brook, Livingstone and Moeen Ali were all big disappointments with the bat, and Root and Stokes just did not contribute enough, barring the odd good innings.

And without their stars coming to the party, England just sank deeper and deeper into a quagmire of their own making.

Buttler was quoted as saying, “Coming into the tournament I felt in fantastic form, as good a form as I’ve been in. So, to be sitting here having had the tournament I’ve had is incredibly frustrating, but it doesn’t shake your belief in yourself.”

Buttler has played 138 T20 games and 29 ODIs in the last four-year cycle. But if he is burnt out from that effort, there will be little or no sympathy because he was doing that by his own choice. He is handsomely compensated by his employers at the ECB, IPL, SA T20 and The Hundred, and earns more than any other England cricketer ever has. Unfortunately, he had little to give at a time when England most needed him to deliver.

His vice-captain Moeen Ali believes England should now move on from their band of ageing World Cup winners after this disappointing campaign (or the lack of it). The 36-year-old accepts that fresh blood must soon be injected into a side made up of thirty-somethings to rejuvenate it.

“Everything good comes to an end,” he says.

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“Maybe the writing was on the wall and we just didn’t see it as players because we thought we’d be performing well. I think if I was in charge, I’d play the younger guys [after this tournament]. I’d just start again and I’m sure they’re going to do that. You want that fearless approach again.”

He continues, “It’s not just [Buttler], it’s everybody. There’s nobody who has really performed in the batting apart from Dawid Malan, who has got a hundred and a couple of fifties. I’m sure everybody are looking at their own performances and are super disappointed with it.”

“We’ve just been rubbish – batting, bowling and fielding. Bowling-wise we were getting a bit better but the batting, we’ve obviously lacked runs. It hurts.”

And that sums up the whole story in simple, direct words.

It isn’t hard to see why England have struggled. This team is the same team from four years ago, just a little weaker and jaded, a little complacent and not well prepared enough - and four years older.

More than anything else this team requires fresh faces, fresh energy and more competition for places if it is to have a decent chance of making a comeback soon.

Disclaimer - The views and opinions expressed are those of the author. The author is a veteran Wing Commander of the Indian Air Force, who has played Ranji Trophy for Services.