Beach, beers and a kick: How England’s Ashes cricketers are spending their Noosa break

England’s struggling Ashes squad have had a “morning kickabout” on the beach in Noosa as they continue to soak up the sun before flying to Adelaide for the third Test.

Members of the travelling English media posted photos of the squad on social media at the beach on Wednesday, the second day of their Sunshine Coast jaunt.

“Certainly no attempts to hide away. All of the players happy to chat with the locals. Ben Stokes even posed with two local radio hosts who turned up in full whites,” posted BBC Sport chief cricket reporter Stephan Shemilt on X, along with a photo of the squad’s beach soccer game.

Captain Ben Stokes and coach Brendon McCullum have been unapologetic about their relaxed schedule as they confront a 2-0 series deficit.

On Tuesday, the England players posed for photos with fans and had beers at a Noosa cafe.

England have spent a total of six days playing Test cricket (out of a possible 10) since they arrived in Australia, officially, on November 10.

They have played nine days of cricket overall, if you include the infamous three-day warm-up they played against themselves at Lilac Hill before the first Test.

There have been 11 training days, although some of those sessions were optional, and nine days off including travel days. By the time the team begins training for the Adelaide Test, starting Wednesday December 17, the total will be 14 days off out of 34.

Former England captain Nasser Hussain is unimpressed. “I can’t understand England’s schedule for the week ahead,” he wrote in The Athletic.

“[They] will be going into the third Test without playing a single warm-up game against Australian opposition, and that is beyond me.”

But former Australia coach Darren Lehmann didn’t mind them having some R and R. “Please let the England players enjoy a few days off without the scrutiny, every side has a break mid-tour. When Adelaide comes around let everything resume,” he said.

McCullum raised eyebrows after England went 2-0 down in Brisbane when he suggested “five intense training days” had taken the edge off his players.

“Sometimes the most important thing is to feel a little bit fresh and make sure your top two inches is completely sound,” McCullum said.

“I think the boys just need a few days off … we’ve got a couple of days in Noosa so we can spend some time together more casually and let the dust settle on what has been a pretty intense couple of weeks and start to plot and plan our way back into the series.”

England skipper Ben Stokes endorsed his coach’s sentiments, saying “just training to train” can be “very, very detrimental”.

The reaction has perhaps best been summed up by one comment from former England fast bowler Darren Gough, who posted on social media: “Over-prepared my arse”.

Gough’s fellow Yorkshireman Geoffrey Boycott concurred, insisting “there is no substitute for competitive match cricket”.

The Noosa trip was a topic on the BBC’s coverage immediately after the end of the Brisbane Test, as the broadcasters highlighted the scrutiny on the tourists.

“The optics will be bad,” ex-England cricketer Jonathan Agnew said on the Test Match Special post-match broadcast.

“And people at home listening must prepare to see lots of photographs of England’s cricketers playing golf. And that is not going to look good.

“Now, do you do things for optics? And what else could they do? Well, the only thing they could do, alternatively, is to go to Adelaide, to bin Noosa … [but] you don’t practise every day, you can’t practise every day.

“But you can at least be there and preparing yourselves mentally. You go to the Adelaide Oval, you do a bit of work every day, just a little bit, before building it up. But then you can go and play your golf in the afternoon.

“As I’ve said so many times – you can’t train all day. And you can’t sit in your hotel room all afternoon and evening when you’ve finished your training. You’ve got to do something. So playing golf is not the problem. The narrative has kind of built up that suggests that actually all they’re interested in is playing golf. Well, that’s not true.

“It’s unfortunate, I think, for England, and it’s entirely of their own doing, that it’s been allowed to grow while they’re losing games.”

Former England batsman David Gower might be entitled to wonder if history is repeating.

Gower, who scored 8231 runs in 117 Tests between 1978 and 1992, was at the centre of a similar debate during the 1990-91 Ashes when he famously hired a Tiger Moth biplane to swoop over a tour match between his teammates and Queensland on the Gold Coast.

The prank riled skipper Graham Gooch, a renowned disciplinarian and fitness fanatic who was trying to reshape his team with new levels of professionalism.

Gower was fined £1000, but worse was to come. England’s leading scorer in that campaign, with 407 runs at an average of 45.2, including two centuries, was axed when the home series against Pakistan started. He was recalled, averaged 50 in his next three Tests, and was then discarded for good.

The laid-back Gower later recalled in his autobiography that it seemed to annoy Gooch and team management that “I could succeed without conforming to the methods that they laid down”.

Teammate Devon Malcolm later wrote that Gooch’s attitude was: “We’re not playing well, so we’ll just have to keep working even harder until we start to play better.”

The paceman added that such an approach was “ill-judged, short-sighted and unintelligent”.

That, of course, was more than 30 years ago.

It’s fair to say sports science has come a long way, but there is a sense of deja vu as former players, media pundits and fans put an under-performing team under the microscope.

The main difference is that, unlike Gower’s high-flying faux pas, this time England’s coach and captain are in the cockpit. Even if it’s a Kamikaze mission, they appear unlikely to change course.

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