Alana King and Ashleigh Gardner spin Australia to huge Ashes Test win and series clean sweep over England

Highlighting the one-sided nature of the game, England’s second innings of 148 was 15 short of Annabel Sutherland’s masterful 163, their match total only marginally more than Australia’s two century-makers.

Most expected Australia to retain the urn this summer but, as Hartley’s comment shows, few foresaw such an uncompetitive series between the nations ranked one and two in the world.

The whitewash cleans out any sour taste from the split series two years ago in England.

“We had a pretty tough Ashes over there a couple of years ago so to play like that and finish like that has been awesome,” coach Shelley Nitschke told Seven.

“We spoke about playing our own way and not put too much focus on the scoreline.

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“The application across the series, it has been pretty hectic with the travel and the amount of games. It makes you feel pretty proud.”

England have turned out some Ashes stinkers on these shores over the years, and this debacle is up there with the worst.

The benchmark for ineptitude was set by the men in the whitewashes of 2006/07 and 2013/14. Heather Knight’s team has matched those lows and, in some aspects, plunged even further.

The one-day international at Junction Oval when King saved the day for Australia, and the rain-affected Twenty20 in Canberra have been the only competitive games in a lop-sided series.

England’s performance in the day/night Test was every bit as comical as the worst losses overseen by Andrew Flintoff and Alastair Cook.

Australia effectively played one short after Ellyse Perry’s injury in the second session of the game, and had its balance affected by the injury to wicketkeeper Alyssa Healy, which forced a reshuffle of the batting line-up and cost leggie Georgia Wareham the chance to play on a spin-friendly track.

The hosts have been a league above their rival in all three disciplines of the game, which is both a credit to Cricket Australia but also rings an alarm bell on the depth in the women’s game given England are the clear No.2 in both white-ball formats.

England’s deplorable performance in the field on Friday, when they missed 10 chances, added a layer of farce.

The decision to send out the youngest member of the team, Ryana MacDonald-Gay, 20, to publicly explain their worst day of the tour was not well thought through. In a functional team, such a job is typically reserved for the captain, a senior player or the head coach.

It left MacDonald-Gay, playing her first match of the tour and her fifth international, in the no-win situation of either delivering an honest and critical assessment of their performance or spouting empty platitudes such as “it was a good day, it was quite long, but we’ve done well” that make her sound deluded.

It’s not the first PR gaffe on this tour, coming after spinner Sophie Ecclestone turned down a TV interview with former international Hartley, who had been critical of the team’s fitness, and coach Jon Lewis’s reference to Australia’s warmer climate for the chasm between the two sides.

Though the current England side were not the holders of the urn, unlike the men in 2006/07 and 2013/14, expectations were high for at least a competitive showing after they drew the 2023 series 8-8 at home.

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England came into this series after winning 30 of 36 completed white-ball games last year. Perhaps their meltdown in the T20 World Cup, when lost their final group game to West Indies in an unofficial quarter-final and bowed out after dominating earlier matches, was a sign of things to come under pressure in Australia.

Flintoff’s tourists, who salvaged a consolation prize in the form of the tri-series at the end of the tour against an Australian team building for the World Cup, have this tour covered. A more suitable comparison would be to the 2013/14 touring party, who only months earlier had retained the urn 3-0 at home.

That squad was beaten 12-1 across the three formats and was mired in controversy with disharmony rife in the dressing room. Jonathan Trott left mid-series, Graeme Swann retired, Kevin Pietersen never played for England again and coach Andy Flower quit soon after.

It remains to be seen if the fallout from this tour will be as fierce, but this is the sort of result that typically prompts reviews, and incumbents like reviews as much as turkeys like Christmas.

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