IT HAS not been an easy Ashes tour for England’s women, who are yet to win a match.

Speaking after his side lost the third T20 of the multi format series, England coach Jon Lewis was on a mission to find some answers to what is going wrong for his side this series.

Despite the end result of Saturday’s match, Lewis had been confident in his team’s chances halfway through the match.

“I felt at half-time we were in the game, and I thought 160 was probably about par score,” Lewis said.

“All the information we had on the wicket and from the players that were on the pitch, they came off and they were pretty confident that we were in a place that we could chase that score down. It’s a pretty poor batting performance, and we’ll hold our hands up for that.”

Lewis is also not convinced that there is an issue in this team about lessons being learned or messages not getting through, noting that “there isn’t a lot of time between games to go away and think and work and make a game.”

“We obviously have honest conversations behind closed doors,” Lewis said. “The players are really honest with how they’re going. “I’ve got a really good group of coaches who are working incredibly hard with the players, and when we get the opportunity around games, the players work incredibly hard on their game.

“I think probably one of the things that’s stood out for me across this tour is actually, we’ve practiced really, really well, but we haven’t played very well. The bit that we’re missing is the bit when we cross the line as to how we go out and perform.”

Despite all this and everything that has happened this tournament, Lewis confirmed that there will be no issues trying to get moral and motivation back up in his group ahead of the test match that begins in Melbourne tomorrow.

“We’ve got a really resilient group of players who are really excited about the opportunity to play test cricket under lights at the MCG,” Lewis explained.

“It’s an occasion that I think in women’s cricket hasn’t happened before and I don’t feel like we’ll need to work hard with the players to get them in a space where they want to go and attack that game.

“It’s every time we play test cricket – which is very rare – the players are incredibly excited about playing and they’ll know that this is gonna be a really tough challenge.”