Ashes: Skipper Ben Stokes opens up on England team being labelled "arrogant"

England captain Ben Stokes said on Saturday that lessons had been learned from their crushing first Test loss to Australia, but that the team had moved on, as he defended a decision for players to skip a pink-ball tour game.

Australia took a 1-0 lead in the five-match Ashes series with a stunning eight-wicket win in a frenetic two-day clash in Perth. “We’ve talked about it and we’ve moved on,” Stokes told reporters on Saturday, as England resumed their training for the second Test to be played with a pink-ball, starting Thursday.

Stokes has pushed back against suggestions that his side carried an air of arrogance in Perth, insisting that saying this was “a little bit too far”. 

Former Australia fast bowler Mitchell Johnson described England as “arrogant”. “Look, you can call us rubbish, call us whatever you want. We didn’t have the Test match that we wanted to.

“We were great in passages of that game… but I think arrogant might be a little bit too far. But that’s okay. We’ll take the rough with the smooth. I’d rather words like “rubbish”, but “arrogant”, I’m not so sure about that,” Stokes.

He also acknowledged the criticism over not sending many first choice players for the warm-up game against PM’s XI. “But there’s obviously a lot more to it than just that. There’s where it is, in Canberra, which is a different state from Brisbane. The conditions are going to be completely different to what we are going to have coming up,” Stokes said.

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