England all-rounder Moeen Ali has said that he “sensed” a result like the England innings defeat at the MCG coming during his time with the Test side.

Moeen, who was part of the England Test set-up as recently as this summer, was speaking on BT Sport‘s coverage of the Test after Australia bowled England out for just 68 to secure a 12th win in 13 home Ashes Tests. The Worcestershire all-rounder retired from Test cricket three months ago and finished his career in the longest format with 195 wickets and five Test hundreds.

Analysing England’s latest defeat, Moeen said that the felt results like this were coming and that some performances at home papered over the cracks.

“I don’t think we’ve been good enough,” said Moeen. “I think it’s been coming, actually. I’ve been part of this team. Not long ago I was in that side. You just felt that sometimes we were papering over the cracks at home where it does do a bit and we’re used to those conditions but we go away, it’s always difficult. If Joe Root doesn’t score then we really struggle to score any sort of…200, or anything competitive.

“I sensed that, I’d been playing for England for a while and when we had [Alastair Cook] and Rooty obviously you kind of get away with it a bit more because they’re still world class players. You need that experience in Test cricket, you need the techniques and that hard work in particular. I’m not saying that we don’t work hard but I’m not sure we work on the right things a lot of the time and I feel like we can be a bit more shrewd and go to the ex-players, the guys who have been there, done that and use their experience as much as they can.”

England’s batting in 2021 has been particularly abject. 13 of the 26 times that they’ve been bowled out in 2021 have been for sub-200 scores. Root – who ended the year with the third-highest tally of runs in a single year in the game’s history – finishes 2021 with a staggering 1,178 than the next highest scoring Englishman this year, Rory Burns.

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