Charlotte Edwards insisted she will make England women’s cricketers “more accountable for fitness” after taking over the role as head coach, two months after the disastrous Ashes series Down Under.
In the aftermath of the 16-0 whitewash humiliation in Australia, the England and Wales Cricket Board reviewed the series and the side, making the decision to replace Jon Lewis and Heather Knight in their roles as head coach and captain respectively.
Conversations over fitness and athleticism have been the spectre the team cannot shake since Alex Hartley first made the point on-air during the T20 World Cup in 2024, and even former head coach Lewis acknowledged that Australia were superior in that department during the Ashes.
While Edwards would not be drawn into the changes she needs to make before joining up with the team on Monday, it is clear that she intends to make a clear break from the “inspire and entertain” mantra embodied by the team under Lewis.
“My first week is actually profiling,” Edwards explained in her first time addressing the media since being announced as the new head coach. “So I’m going to judge for myself about where the team are with their fitness. I will make the players more accountable for fitness, that’s something I’m going to do, but I think there’s many aspects to this.”
As a player, Edwards led England to three Ashes series wins, a 50-over World Cup and a T20 World Cup, at a time when the nation was heralded as the standard-bearers in the sport – albeit it was only right at the end of her tenure that the game turned fully professional.
Sitting in the newly branded media centre at Lord’s ahead of the start of the domestic season, Edwards admitted one of her biggest challenges is going to be switching focus from the relaxed environment and mantra cultivated by Lewis, and transforming England into a successful side.
“It’s bottling that kind of entertaining and aggressive approach but I think for me it’s about their game smarts and their game awareness,” she said. “It’s about winning games. I’m under no illusions. I’ve come into this role and it’s about winning.
“I think as coaches we’re sometimes too scared to say we want to win. That’s our job, my job is to win games of cricket and I think it’s how we go and do that now and I think that looks different on each given day. I just want to create some intelligent players who win games of cricket for England and that’s going to be how I’ll go about stuff over the next few weeks and try and instil that within the players.”
Edwards played with some of the current crop during her 11-year role as England captain, after a career spanning more than 20 years in the side, making 309 appearances, but admitted: “I think I’m a much better coach than captain if I’m honest.”
One of Edwards’s first tasks will be to appoint a captain, and she will also have to select her first squad before the side play on May 21 against the West Indies.
Before that, she has encouraged those competing for an England call-up to impress during the first few rounds of the county season, something many of them have not had to do in recent years.
Such is the nature of cricket, major tournaments are almost every other year, and for Edwards, the first real test will be the World Cup in India in the autumn.
Clare Connor, managing director of England Women, led the review into the Ashes humiliation and selected Edwards for the role, while acknowledging that the process was different from previous appointments.
In 2018, the ECB introduced the Rooney Rule – a mandate to interview at least one minority candidate – for all national coaching positions, and was later rolled out into county cricket, but the most recent England Women head coach vacancy was never advertised.
“We didn’t run the normal open recruitment process that we would for a coach in the England Women’s environment,” Connor explained, adding that the governing body was looking for someone with a proven track record, ability to create a women’s culture, an understanding of the game domestically and internationally.
“Then you add to that you want someone with passion and care for the women’s game and so it was very obvious that Lottie [Edwards] was the person that we needed to get,” she said.
“I’ve gone back and outlined, looked at the process for every single other coaching appointment we’ve made over the last seven years in England women’s cricket. Every other appointment we have since the Rooney Rule came in to recruitment good practice, we have followed it in the England women’s cricket department.
“We didn’t on this occasion, and I am very, very happy with where we are.”
