Tammy Beaumont opens up about her expectations from her team against Australia

Tammy Beaumont has said that she will be backing England to compete with the Australian forces in a much better display after a loss in the opening tie of the Women’s Ashes. The two fierce rivals will be going head-to-head with each other in the Adelaide for the T20I leg of the Women’s Ashes to settle the scores.

England suffered a crushing defeat in the opening T20I of the Women’s Ashes and Beaumont believes that it was a one-off and the English women are very well capable of turning things around. Despite a heavy defeat in the series opener, Tammy Beaumont wanted to highlight the positives for England until now.

She quoted, “We've come a long way in the space of less than a week. There's still a long way to go. We've got a lot more cricket to play, and I'm sure [we] will improve. We wanted to come out here and play the way we want to play T20 cricket, and to put 170 on the board was certainly the way we go about it. The way Danni Wyatt came out and really attacked - particularly the spinners down the ground - I thought was exceptional.”

She continued, “We wanted to say that we're going to come toe-to-toe with Australia, and I think they were surprised in the field. You saw some mistakes from them, so I think we started well but we've just got to try and get over the line."

Beaumont summed up the fact that there was very little that the English batters could pull off in front of the mighty Talia McGrath who claimed a double-wicket over and followed it another crucial scalp of Amy Jones.

Despite Sophie Ecclestone removing Alyssa Healy for cheap in the fourth over of the innings, Australia didn’t suffer any ado at all as McGrath and Lanning stitched a comfortable stand to see the Australians through. Lanning hammered a 44-ball-64 to underline the electrifying brilliance of Australia.

Beaumont tried stoking the English players up by citing, “I've been part of heavier defeats in some ways. Obviously, they have got a nine-wicket win at the end of the day but to post 170 on a ground where the par in women's cricket here is a lot lower is a massive positive. We started really well in the powerplay as well with the ball. We've got to tighten up some areas: we probably didn't field well enough on our ground fielding, and maybe tighten up our lines a little bit and come back with some plans to try and get those two out."

With the hosts winning the opening chapter of the multi-format contest, England will have to do a lot more digging in order to avert the inevitable fate that their male counterparts suffered at the hands of the Australians.

Beaumont continued, “We just need to build a bit of pressure, get a couple of dots an over, stop the boundary balls and then if they've got to get nine an over - which they did at one stage - they're going to have to take more risks," Beaumont said. "They played really well, took the right risks at the right time, but I'm not too worried about our bowling attack - it's been brilliant for the last two, three years."

She concluded by saying, “At the beginning of the day we would definitely have taken 170," Beaumont said. "We just really wanted to get off to a good start and set the tone really well for our team. Credit to Tahlia McGrath, she bowled two brilliant yorkers there to get our two set batters out and that's probably the difference between kicking onto like 180-190."