Moeen Ali: I felt I was letting down the team and fans during Ashes

Few players have had a tougher tour than Moeen Ali. A humbling Ashes series that brought only 179 runs and four wickets in five Tests left the all‑rounder a shell of his exuberant self.

Even the five-wicket win on Sunday in the opening match of the one‑day series has not yet eased the disappointments of England’s 4-0 Ashes defeat and his own performance.

“The intensity is quite high and people talking about you all the time gets to you,” he said at Melbourne airport as the squad travelled to Brisbane for the second ODI on Friday. “I feel like I was letting the team down, the fans down. It’s not that you are not scoring runs or not getting wickets. It’s just that you feel, as an individual, you are letting your team-mates down.”

Those feelings will have been amplified by the display of Nathan Lyon, who not only showed up Moeen as a spinner with 21 wickets but also removed the left-hander a record‑equalling eight times in 10 innings. Moeen said: “They had a gun spinner bowling brilliantly. We didn’t.”

White-ball success will not make up for red-ball trauma but it will continue England’s steady rise in ODI cricket – something the Australia captain, Steve Smith, acknowledged following Jason Roy’s record-breaking 180. “England’s got to be up there as one of the best teams in the world in one-day cricket at the moment,” he said.

The format brings Moeen greater clarity as a containing off-spinner and lower‑order finisher. He conceded only one boundary at the MCG and the wicket he picked up – his 50th – was the centurion Aaron Finch.

“I really enjoyed it. Bowling to someone like Finch is a great challenge and I felt that having five bowlers meant it was a key role for me. Something I pride myself on is to go for fewer boundaries than everybody else. And I did.”

The camaraderie in the ODI side will continue to aid Moeen as it has players such as Roy. When the opener had passed his hundred his team-mates urged him to beat Alex Hales’s England record score of 171.

“When J-Roy was batting we were egging him on,” Moeen said. “When he was on 120 everyone thought he was going to do it.”

(GUARDIAN)