England Women will take a select group of batters to Mumbai for a training camp after their tied Ashes contest and more recent 2-1 T20I series defeat to Sri Lanka exposed weaknesses against spin that head coach Jon Lewis believes other teams will look to exploit.
With a tour of India scheduled at the end of this year followed by the 2024 T20 World Cup in Bangladesh and the 50-over version in India in 2025, Lewis said facing spin was a key area his side must improve if they are to contend for trophies.
"Off the back of the Ashes, and from what I saw at the World Cup, it's pretty clear that the way we play spin bowling is a big area for development for us," Lewis told reporters after Sri Lanka's seven-wicket victory in Derby on Wednesday night gave the tourists a historic 2-1 series win against England. "And it's been highlighted here. It's brilliant exposure for our players to understand this is where you're at in your cricketing journey, these are the bits of the game that we need to improve.
"We've got a 20-over World Cup in Bangladesh, we've got a tour to India and we've got a 50-over World Cup in India. So our next three big challenges in reality, there's going to be a lot of spin bowled at us. People will watch us play spin and they'll go, 'right, okay, we think we can exploit this team in that area'. So I'm really keen to get to work with the girls, and how they play the spin bowling and the options that they have, because there's there a lot of areas for growth."
Lewis didn't identify which players would be a part of the camp, but told the BBC it would be held "before some of the girls go off to the Big Bash". Among the eight England players picked up in the inaugural WBBL draft this week were captain Heather Knight, Danni Wyatt, Alice Capsey, Maia Bouchier, Bryony Smith, Bess Heath and Danielle Gibson. Heath was named in England's T20I and ODI squads for Sri Lanka's visit but remains uncapped so far while Smith made the last of her nine international appearances during the T20 leg of India's tour to England a year ago and the rest all featured in the T20Is against Sri Lanka.
In the opening match of this latest series in Hove, England raced to 186 for 4 in 17 overs, with Capsey scoring a 26-ball half-century, before rain curtailed Sri Lanka's reply and the hosts won by 12 runs under the DLS method. But they were then bundled out for 104 and 116 in the next two games as Sri Lanka became the first side other than Australia to beat England in a bilateral T20I series since New Zealand in 2010.
Of the 24 English wickets to fall in the series, 17 were to spin, providing further evidence of a key weakness after England's struggles against Australia's Ashleigh Gardner, who finished with 23 wickets as Player of the Series during the drawn Ashes.
Kavisha Dilhari, Sri Lanka's 22-year-old off-spinner, emerged as a threat with five wickets at 10.20 and an economy rate of 5.66 while Chamari Athapaththu, their captain, proved damaging primarily as the leading run-scorer of the T20Is by a long way with 114, but she also took five wickets at 11.40 and an economy rate of 5.18.
"We've been outplayed," Lewis reflected. "Credit to Sri Lanka, I thought they played some really, really good cricket. In particular, they bowled incredibly tight lines with all their spin bowlers and obviously we struggled to cope with that and didn't play it particularly well. And there was some sloppy cricket at times in it with our batting.
"Chamari Athapaththu played exactly how I'd like our batters to play and put us under a lot of pressure. I thought she played fantastically well in the two innings that she got away in the last two games. The pace that they got away at in both games is obviously the difference between the teams with the bat as well."
England were without a number of more experienced players, opting to rest star allrounder Nat Sciver-Brunt, batter Sophia Dunkley and the world's leading spinner, Sophie Ecclestone, who subsequently dislocated her right, non-bowling, shoulder during the Hundred. They also lost seamer Lauren Bell to illness and Tammy Beaumont continues to be overlooked in the shortest format as England seek to expose younger players to the international stage.
That strategy has opened the door for Mahika Gaur, the tall, 17-year-old left-arm seamer who has previously represented UAE at Under-19 level, as well as Bouchier at the top of the order and forced Sarah Glenn and Charlie Dean to shoulder more of the spin-bowling responsibility Ecclestone would normally carry.
Sciver-Brunt and Beaumont will return for the three-match ODI series, starting in Durham on Saturday, but Lewis expressed no regrets over England's youth development policy.
"We're trying to work out how we want to play and the mindset we want to go into each game with, and which individuals are capable of doing that," Lewis said. "And you won't find that out unless you expose them to international cricket. So the decision-making before the series was very much around trying to give people opportunity who've been sat on the edge of our squad or just outside our squad, to try and learn about what they're capable of under pressure.
"Obviously every time we've taken some risk in terms of winning, but what we are hopeful of is the opportunities we've given the players will generate brilliant coaching conversations and an understanding of where each player is at in terms of themselves on their journey and how they need to develop because we are a developing team.
"We've got three teenagers out playing for us at the moment, which is fantastic, but they will now go away from this experience and be able to learn about how to improve their game, to be able to become brilliant international cricketers, to be able to dominate the top teams in the world. Those are the conversations that we'll be having with our players over the course of this next series and over the course of the next year or two."