England have to be okay to not be okay with losing،
In a deleted scene from Ridley Scott's epic Gladiator, Russell Crowe cuts off his opponent's head before yelling, “You win and you learn. You try not to get too high or too low. That was my day today 'today, but Maximus is a great player and he will come back stronger.'
Maximus is dead, Russell.
Is it a successful West Indies tour for England? Publicly, the message is that of a successful exercise. A close defeat in the ODI series with a new group of players, supported by a spirited comeback in the T20I series before falling to a 3-2 defeat. It was as much about learning as it was about winning, and the fact that they cracked the Caribbean code after losing 2-0, realizing at that moment that they had to fight “fire with fire” and that 'They then won two of the next three is brilliant.
But the fact is that England lost. It's finish. And if winning is a habit, so is losing. There have been eight matches this tour and England have lost five of them. And there were two decisive matches on that tour and England lost them both.
“It’s a pretty new group and they need to be treated like that,” coach Matthew Mott said before the deciding game. “We try to prepare them to perform as best as they can and then, especially in T20, sometimes the results are completely out of your control. So if you can keep that mindset and keep trying to pull the get the best out of the people around you, I don't think you're really concerned about winning/losing.”
The argument that this T20 group is new borders on gaslighting. Eight of the England players on the pitch today were in the starting XI in last year's World Cup final. Ten of the 11 have played in the IPL, with the sole exception of Rehan Ahmed.
For all the talk that individual outcomes may be out of your control, that wasn't the case today. On a pitch where 150 would have been very competitive, England managed to reach 110 for 4 with more than five overs to reach 132 in total. Reach over 150 and fall victim to a successful chase against West Indies after winning the toss and then fair play. But that's not what happened. The fact that England forced him into the final was a testament to their spirit of unity, but also to the fact that they had really messed things up with their batting.
“Really proud of our effort,” Mott told TNT Sports after the game. “There were different types of conditions throughout [the series]. We really couldn't have learned more from this tour.”
This is a group judged on the basis of a tough ODI World Cup, as opposed to the standard of being reigning world champions – as it should be. And that’s why the message gets angry. This is an excellent England team who suffered a series defeat and broke Harry Brook's world record after losing 4-1. The margins are good. But England has always been on the wrong side. They have played three T20I series since their World Cup victory and have failed to win any of them.
Of course, balancing public praise and private criticism is a notoriously difficult task. No one expects Mott or Jos Buttler to come out and criticize their team, but keep emphasizing that defeat is acceptable and that the intensity of the competition you are participating in will decrease.
One of the biggest problems in cricket is that it spends its life playing series just to prepare for the next one. Today, England were in a series decider after coming back from 2-0 down. If, even in this context, winning was secondary to learning, then what are we doing here? The expression is Carpe Diemnot carp cras.
It is also a public message which is in contradiction with private sentiment. Elite athletes care about winning and losing. After the second T20I, Moeen Ali was visibly irritated. After the third, Phil Salt admitted that “no team in the world is happy to lose games” and that England had felt “under fire”.
“I was so excited to come here because it was basically like a final and these are the games you want to play and be on the good side of,” Reece Topley said shortly after the match ended. “There has been some incredible cricket played in the five matches. It is exhausting. There is a lot of talk about Test cricket being the priority… [but] the bottom line is you want to win this series, especially as a player where white ball cricket is my test cricket, so I want to win every series possible for England.
It's okay not to accept losing. At the ODI World Cup, Ben Stokes won huge favor for his honest assessment that England had “been c*ap”. There is of course a counter-argument that it would be unhealthy for players to invest so much mentally in every match they play. The highs would be too high and the lows too low in a format as volatile as T20. But for sport as entertainment to shrug its shoulders like “we learned that” during a dramatic defeat – who does that help? Aren't you amused? Not really, no one seems to care.
It has by no means been a disastrous series for England and it is true that they will benefit greatly from five matches in these conditions when the World Cup comes around in six months' time. Salt has been a revelation, Liam Livingstone's move to No.4 seems perfect, Adil Rashid has been a magician and Topley has been brilliant. But they lost. And it can’t stop mattering.
