Blame players, not WAGS, for England’s Perth defeat: Swann

LONDON - If off-spinner Graeme Swann is to be believed, the England players are 100 per cent convinced they can recapture their form in time for the Boxing Day Test and still win the Ashes series.Australia did to us what we did to them in the previous Test - thrashed us out of sight. It’s an amazing, fluctuating contest with two evenly-matched teams producing uneven games,” Swann writes in an article for The Sun.

“Our mood remains very upbeat. We’re confident we can win the Fourth Test in Melbourne starting on Boxing Day in front of huge daily crowds of 100,000. It will be an incredible atmosphere,” he adds.

The series is certainly full-on now. There was plenty of chirp flying around between the players in the Third Test and I think that was because the pitch was lively, Swann said.

“I don’t think there’s been much malicious intent - it is just good, competitive, aggressive, red-blooded cricket and that is exactly what people want to see. There’s no guarantee it will happen again, either. We weren’t batting well and the Aussies were taking wickets - and they were fired up because they were desperate to level the series,” he adds.

“Having our loved ones here made no difference to the way we trained or played. We lost because we under-performed not because I had dinner with my wife on the second evening,” he concludes. (ANI)