Why are Australia so much better than England?

England have once again failed to regain the Women’s Ashes for a sixth consecutive series in a stretch going back longer than a decade.

So why the gulf? And what makes Australia so vastly superior?

England’s last Women’s Ashes success came 11 years ago. The last time they beat Australia in an ICC knockout match was in 2009.

Eleven tournaments have passed since then, with England’s solitary success a memorable title in 2017. Australia, meanwhile, have amassed eight World Cups (T20 and ODI), plus this run of Ashes triumphs.

BBC Sport digs into the reasons behind Australia’s dominance.

A winning mentality & identifying young talent

Australia have a generation of players who will go down as true greats.

Of the five Australians to have gone past 6,000 international runs, four are current or recently retired (Meg Lanning left the international game in 2023).

But as great as they are as athletes, it’s the fact they chose cricket as their preferred career route since so many of the current Australia team excel in other sports too.

Of the current squad, Darcie Brown represented South Australia Schools in netball and Phoebe Litchfield played hockey for Australia under-16s.

Oh, and Ellyse Perry represented Australia internationally at football and scored in a Fifa World Cup semi-final.

The fact they can attract their nation’s best female athletic talent is key; and something head coach Jon Lewis believes England struggle to do.

“A lot of other sports will probably take the majority of the more athletic kids, maybe football for example, which is probably the biggest growing sport in the UK in the women’s space,” said Lewis.

“So we have a quite limited talent pool, and we have to select the best cricketers from that and then we have to try and teach them how to be more athletic.”

Increased funding = increased success

Australia have also led the way with funding.

In 2023, Cricket Australia announced a five-year pay deal which boosted female salaries by 66%. There has also been a $500m (approximately £251m) commitment to “female friendly” infrastructure.

International players can earn up to $800,000 (approximately £402,000) when combined with domestic contracts.

The England and Wales Cricket Board have also worked hard to keep cricket as a competitive option for talented female athletes who have more choices than ever.

International contracts for centrally-contracted players are said to be worth between £90,000-£130,000 annually, with the potential of an additional £65,000 for the top contracts in The Hundred. This is before endorsements and overseas franchise deals.

All-rounder Nat Sciver-Brunt, for example, earned £320,000 for her appearance in India’s Women’s Premier League in 2023, a tournament that lasted just three weeks.

Cricket is fighting well on the salary front compared to other professional women’s sport in the UK – a 2022 BBC report suggested the average WSL salary for a Lioness was £47,000 before match fees and endorsements.

So if the money is increasingly there, what about the depth of the talent pool?

In Australia, professional domestic women’s cricket has existed for longer than in England. The first contracts in Australia came about in 2017, in England this was in 2020. Australia has 130 professionals domestically, England from 2025 will have a minimum of 120.

There is also a well-resourced and well-established domestic league structure: Litchfield’s New South Wales Breakers have been playing as a side continuously since the 1930s.

Compare that to England’s domestic set-up which has, to put it mildly, been chaotic. A 35-team county competition of varying standard ended in 2019, replaced by eight regional teams such as the Southern Vipers and Western Storm.

They have now been disbanded and from this summer, it will be the eight tier one county sides. Even for those involved it’s been hard to keep up, so has talent spotting been as effective as it might have been?

Depth may therefore be a significant point of difference, but there are unquestionably some fine players in the England side who are just as valuable to franchise leagues around the world.

And if these players are getting the training, the funding and the exposure, why are they time and again failing in comparison to their Australian rivals?

Marginal gains and high standards

From first-hand experience having followed the women’s game closely for well over a decade, there are small details that perhaps make a big difference.

Australia are relentless in everything that they do. No stone is left unturned, no chance is taken. Even off the field no quarter is given.

“There’s always another edge or another way that they want to go about it, whether that’s athleticism, the way that they’re working or strength,” said ex-Australia leg-spinner and current under-19s coach Kristen Beams.

During the T20 World Cup of 2024 in the United Arab Emirates (a tournament both England and Australia surprisingly crashed out of), I saw some remarkable examples of this commitment.

Star all-rounder Perry wheeled her own racing bike into the hotel lift with an attachment to allow her to train statically in her room. Players would go through gruelling gym sessions before heading for a round of golf.

There was little to no evidence on social media of the players enjoying the opportunities for revelry that Dubai allows.

During this Ashes series, fresh off the plane in Hobart, I saw opener Litchfield sprinting round the harbour on her own. Training day or not, players take responsibility to be machine-like athletes.

Any player that doesn’t live up to the standards doesn’t get selected. Take Amanda-Jade Wellington, whose international career has stuttered despite exceptional talent and match-winning performances around the world in franchise leagues.

After last year’s T20 World Cup, coach Lewis and captain Heather Knight were at pains to counter claims by some in the media that England were not fit enough.

“Fitness wasn’t the reason we lost” was the repeated mantra. That may be true, but no-one watching this series (or frankly during the last decade) could argue England are remotely as physically dominating as Australia.

When asked during this series, Lewis told me cricketers have a limit to what their bodies can do: “I worked incredibly hard on my fitness as a cricketer, I was proud of myself for being incredibly fit. But I could still only bowl 80 miles an hour. I couldn’t bowl 90 miles an hour as hard as I tried.”

This may be true, but watch closely and Australia save dozens of runs in the field every match. Stunning catches are taken time and again.

It is not a coincidence and Lewis recognises Australia are ahead in this area: “I would say yeah they are, they’re a much more athletic team than us, they’re more agile, they look faster, at times they look more powerful.”

And Beams agrees: “As a past player I would not fit in the environment that it is right now because I think the current group continues to take it to a new level.”

Game smarts and attitude

One former England coach previously suggested to me that Australia were genetically superior, a statement that would perhaps test the credulity of most evolutionary scientists.

Lewis, meanwhile, was criticised after saying the Australian climate is a big advantage: “I walked from Bondi to Coogee the other Sunday morning and pretty much the whole of the eastern suburbs of Sydney were out swimming in the sea and running and walking so you’re like, there’s a cultural difference.”

Athletes from other sports have railed against this notion. Would a Lioness say that endless cold nights at training left them at a disadvantage in comparison to Spain or Italy?

Lewis has also repeatedly talked about England players having freedom to make bold decisions for themselves, both on and off the field, sentiments borrowed from the ‘Bazball’ approach of the England men’s Test squad.

However, barring occasional, mercurial exceptions, England remain painfully timid in pressure moments.

Conversely, during this series Australia have faced tough moments several times, notably in the third ODI when they fell to 59-4. They went on to score 308-8.

They consistently show game intelligence that seems to be ingrained as cricketers from a young age, and something sorely missing from England.

England wicketkeeper Amy Jones, who is technically the best in the game behind the stumps, told me after a miscalculation in the second ODI that she had little experience of managing who was on strike at the end of a run chase: “I can safely say I don’t think I’ve ever farmed the strike before in a game,” she said.

This is no slight on 31-year-old Jones, who has more than 200 caps for England, but rather a symptom of a structure that has failed to develop cricketers with the in-built game smarts that seem second nature to Australia.

Part of the challenge in the women’s game is judging where you are as a side often only happens when you play against the mighty Australians.

Rolling over New Zealand and Pakistan last summer was impressive from England, but how hard did they have to work to win the games? The odd extra boundary conceded in the field didn’t matter so much. To Australia, saving every run is a badge of honour.

As seen in the memorable Women’s Ashes series of 2023 that was drawn 8-8, England have the talent to compete. But sometimes the language from the two sides suggests that competing alone is enough for one but not the other.

After the first ODI, a game Australia won, the message from Australia’s Alana King was clear. “I don’t think that [performance] was a marker of any sort.”

England captain Heather Knight, meanwhile, said: “[We’re] not far away, there’s a few things we can tidy up.”

Are England any good? Yes, compared to almost every team they’re exceptional. But compared to Australia they are light years behind. To beat them, they must match them, down to every last tiny detail and beyond.

For every yard sprinted, England must aim to sprint one more.