In his latest exclusive column for Sky Sports, Joe Root discusses the way forward for England ahead of the Edgbaston Test, super-confident Jonny Bairstow and the ribbing he received after the Lord's defeat...
The whole team understands how much a defeat like Lord’s hurts every cricket fan in the country because every guy in the dressing room is a massive England fan too.
Every one of us loves playing for England and we get the opportunity to do what a lot of people watching want to do. We don’t take it lightly when we perform as we did last week, it wasn’t good enough, and the key thing now is to learn from the mistakes, draw a line under it and move on.
After the defeat we had a bit of time off and a chance to go home and see friends and family but I’ve pretty much been getting permanent stick from them all. I get a lot of banter off my mates but it’s still nice to go home, see those friends and family and escape from the game for a few days because when you play all year round you can get quite intense.
You can relax, switch off completely and recharge your batteries. It means when you rock up again you are ready to go and your mind is clear and you can focus on being back at our best when we get out in the middle.
Every Ashes Test is massively important and of course you want to put in a strong performance every time you go out and represent England but this is a big match now - in the context of this series to go 2-1 up now would be fantastic.
It would lay a marker down after the way we played at Lord’s and it is exactly what we are striving to do. We are more than capable of doing it, it’s just keeping things dead simple and concentrating on all the good stuff we have done previously and doing it more consistently.
And look at the way we played in Cardiff when we wiped the floor with them. It’s not like we can’t beat them or we are miles behind them, we have proved that already this series. We’ve got three, exciting, big encounters to come.
It’s not always going to go our way and it was disappointing it went so badly at Lord’s but it’s gone, we move on, a fresh start and a three-match series. We have to put Australia on the back foot, put them under pressure from the start.
Throughout this our new coach Trevor Bayliss has been a very relaxed character. What he is very good at is staying very calm, in both situations; not getting too high when we win or too emotional either way.
That’s a great place to be in and something we can all learn from going forward as a side, to make sure that we are level-headed and looking forward to the next game, focused on being at our absolute best.
The squad met up on Monday morning with Jonny Bairstow coming in for Gary Ballance. The thing with Jonny is that he is so confident at the minute. The way he has been playing has been outstanding; he is averaging over a hundred, with five tons this summer in County Championship cricket and a double hundred in there – that’s a phenomenal effort.
He’s in the form of his life and I am as excited as he is to see him go out there and try to emulate that on the international stage. I want to see him show everyone what he can do.
And I see no reason why having someone energetic and confident, as he is now, won’t give everyone a lift.
As a team we aren’t down and we know we are more than capable of turning it around when we walk out on Wednesday.
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