Ashes 2025: England reveal dressing room meetings to plan sledging in India Test

Sydney Morning Herald

22-07-2025

'I think a couple of England sides can sometimes come across as too nice and we actually spoke about that as a group,' Carse said at a sponsor's media opportunity between Tests. 'There's a lot of times when you play against sides as an opposition and they get stuck into us and we kind of sit back and don't get involved too much.
'So I think – and again going back to [Lord's] and to the latter part of that game – moving forwards it will certainly be something that we remember as a group going into an away Ashes tour where no doubt there will be some tough moments out there. But we will definitely not take a backwards step to the Aussies.'
Brydon Carse. Credit: Getty Images
McCullum's resort to the motivational skills of Enoka – who has also had a longtime role with the All Blacks – has a profound irony to it given all this recent talk of sledging and not being too nice. It was with Enoka's help that McCullum chose to steer his New Zealand side away from sledging, having decided that the Black Caps were not suited to the brazen tactics of past Australian sides led by the likes of Steve Waugh.
'People undoubtedly warmed to the fact that we no longer sledged the opposition,' McCullum said in 2016. 'We worked out what would work for us, based on the traits of being Kiwis. To try to be humble and hardworking and to enjoy what we were doing.
'For us, sledging in an abusive manner just didn't fit with who we believed we had to be. It wasn't authentic to being a New Zealander.'
Loading
England's approach in the third Test at Lord's was very different.
'We try to play in the spirit of the game as much as possible, but them lads went hard at Crawley and Ducky on that night when [Jasprit] Bumrah bowled that single over,' Brook said. 'So we watched that and we reassessed and we thought it was the right time to go back at them.
'It might have given them that little bit of added pressure and thankfully they ended up crumbling and we won the game. The opportunity that arose for us to not be the nice guys was because of what they did.
'We just thought, 'We're not standing for that'. We had a conversation and said, 'It's time to not be those nice guys that we have been before'. We were doing it within the spirit of the game. We weren't going out there effing and jeffing at them and being nasty people.'
Under the captaincy of Pat Cummins, Australia have steered well away from sledging, certainly of the premeditated kind.
'I would say that people, media and fans, who've followed our team closely over the last few years would tend to agree [we don't sledge],' Mitchell Starc said last month.
News, results and expert analysis from the weekend of sport are sent every Monday. Sign up for our Sport newsletter.