ENG vs AUS: England hasn’t been able to put a game together in World Cup 2023, says Ben Stokes

England batter Ben Stokes has delivered an honest verdict on the team’s disastrous World Cup 2023 campaign, saying that they haven’t been able to put a game together.

England’s title defense at the 2023 World Cup was marked by a series of defeats, with the team losing five out of six games. This poor performance effectively ended their hopes of reaching the semi-finals.

The team’s downfall was sudden and unexpected, as they lost to India by 100 runs, Sri Lanka by 8 wickets, South Africa by 229 runs, Afghanistan by 69 runs, and New Zealand by 9 wickets. Their only victory was against Bangladesh, where they won by 137 runs.

ICC ODI World Cup 2023: Full Coverage | Points Table

England are up against Australia in their next game and Stokes delivered an honest verdict of the team’s campaign and said they weren’t up to the mark. The all-rounder also felt that whatever they tried in the tournament hadn’t worked out.

Stokes also said, as a team, they haven’t been close to competing in the World Cup. The batter also said they haven’t been able to pinpoint the reason.

“No, I think the problem is that we’ve been crap. To be honest with you, we’ve been crap. Everything we’ve tried throughout this World Cup, through trying to put pressure back onto the opposition in a way in which we know, or trying to soak up the pressure in a different way, which we know we’ve done before and been successful with, it’s just not worked.”

Every opportunity that we’ve had in front of us where we feel like we can take control of the game, the opposition’s managed to get it back towards them. And we’ve just not been able to put a full game together, or even got close to putting a full game together except against Bangladesh. If you dive too much into it around cricket, you find you come out with more questions than answers.

We know that as individuals and as a team, I think that’s where it is as a team, we’ve been nowhere near good enough to be able to compete in a World Cup, which has been incredibly disappointing because we know we’re so, so much better than what we’ve shown out here. And not having an answer and being able to understand as to why it’s gone wrong is very simple. That’s the answer. Because if we knew what had gone wrong, we would have been able to fix it. But unfortunately, we don’t. It’s just been one of those tournaments where, yeah, it’s just been a disaster. And there’s no point sugarcoating it because it’s probably what you’re all going to write anyway, and it’s true.