‘Get stuck into them’: England reveal sledging meetings – and plans to bring the lip for the Ashes

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England’s vice-captain Harry Brook has revealed the dressing room conversations that led the Ashes combatants to take up premeditated, tactical sledging against India, as Ben Stokes’ team gears up for the trip to Australia this summer.

And pace bowler Brydon Carse has explicitly linked this abrasive approach to how England want to battle Australia for the Ashes here, where England have not won a Test match since 2011, the last time they retained the urn away from home.

After a spiteful Lord’s Test where players on both sides lost their cool on several occasions, Brook said that coach Brendon McCullum – who has employed his friend and former New Zealand psychologist Gilbert Enoka to help motivate the England players – told the team before the game that they were “too nice” to opponents.

When India’s captain Shubman Gill harried the England openers Zak Crawley and Ben Duckett as they tried to avoid another over being bowled on the third evening, Brook used the episode as a pretext to initiate a sledging barrage for the remainder of the match, which England went on to win narrowly.

“‘Baz’ actually said a few days before the Test that we are too nice sometimes and I brought it up the night before the last day – I said, ‘I think tomorrow is a perfect opportunity to really get stuck into them,’” Brook said before the fourth Test in Manchester. England lead India 2-1 with two Tests to play.

“We had a little conversation the night before, where everybody saw them guys get stuck into ‘Creeps’ and ‘Ducky’ [Crawley and Duckett] and we just thought, ‘We’re not having that’. We all piled into them.

“I’ve had a lot of compliments. Everybody says it was awesome to watch and it looked like there was 11 versus two out there when we were fielding and it was good fun. It made fielding a lot more enjoyable.”

Carse, who bowled a fiery spell to set England on the path to winning at Lord’s while defending a small fourth innings target, said that expectations of a difficult Ashes assignment had the players thinking about making sure they were similarly aggressive in Australia.

“I think a couple of England sides can sometimes come across as too nice and we actually spoke about that as a group,” Carse said at a sponsor’s media opportunity between Tests. “There’s a lot of times when you play against sides as an opposition and they get stuck into us and we kind of sit back and don’t get involved too much.

“So I think – and again going back to [Lord’s] and to the latter part of that game – moving forwards it will certainly be something that we remember as a group going into an away Ashes tour where no doubt there will be some tough moments out there. But we will definitely not take a backwards step to the Aussies.”

McCullum’s resort to the motivational skills of Enoka – who has also had a longtime role with the All Blacks – has a profound irony to it given all this recent talk of sledging and not being too nice. It was with Enoka’s help that McCullum chose to steer his New Zealand side away from sledging, having decided that the Black Caps were not suited to the brazen tactics of past Australian sides led by the likes of Steve Waugh.

“People undoubtedly warmed to the fact that we no longer sledged the opposition,” McCullum said in 2016. “We worked out what would work for us, based on the traits of being Kiwis. To try to be humble and hardworking and to enjoy what we were doing.

“For us, sledging in an abusive manner just didn’t fit with who we believed we had to be. It wasn’t authentic to being a New Zealander.”

England’s approach in the third Test at Lord’s was very different.

“We try to play in the spirit of the game as much as possible, but them lads went hard at Crawley and Ducky on that night when [Jasprit] Bumrah bowled that single over,” Brook said. “So we watched that and we reassessed and we thought it was the right time to go back at them.

“It might have given them that little bit of added pressure and thankfully they ended up crumbling and we won the game. The opportunity that arose for us to not be the nice guys was because of what they did.

“We just thought, ‘We’re not standing for that’. We had a conversation and said, ‘It’s time to not be those nice guys that we have been before’. We were doing it within the spirit of the game. We weren’t going out there effing and jeffing at them and being nasty people.”

Under the captaincy of Pat Cummins, Australia have steered well away from sledging, certainly of the premeditated kind.

“I would say that people, media and fans, who’ve followed our team closely over the last few years would tend to agree [we don’t sledge],” Mitchell Starc said last month.

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