England asks: 'What the Faulk?'

James Faulkner's stunning heroics in Friday night's Carlton Mid one-day international left England asking just one question: 'What the Faulk?'

The question was posed by The Sun newspaper after the Tasmanian's match-winning knock sent the UK press into a tailspin, with The Telegraph declaring "England's cricketers hit rock bottom with their stunning defeat".

The Telegraph asked the (perhaps rhetorical) question "Can it get any worse for English sport?" and with a soccer World Cup coming gallows humour is the order of the day in the Old Dart.

"The England ODI performance in Brisbane on Friday was one for the connoisseur, no question. Having used the Ashes to explore in precise detail all the various ways of being annihilated, they shifted gears to showcase more of their full repertoire: the gut-shot defeat from a position of seeming impregnability," wrote The Telegraph's Alan Tyers.

"The cricket team’s flirtations with success have allowed them to gain altitude before swooping down to the current sensational lows yet, curiously, this is the state in which the casual fan assumes, more or less, always to find them: ie mewling, pathetic and being used as an ashtray by bulging-biceped Australians."

While Irishman Eoin Morgan's century was lauded, and Barbados-born Chris Jordan's remarkable caught-and-bowled dismissal of David Warner applauded, the touring media's malaise reached new depths.

Calling it an "agonising dollop of heartbreak", The Sun's chief cricket writer John Etheridge wrote: "It looked as though England would finally beat the Aussies this winter in the second one-day international. But Faulkner transformed the match with an astonishing display of hitting which brought him five sixes – all of them off Ben Stokes.

"It means England have now lost eight successive international games. That’s seven this winter – including the 0-5 Ashes whitewash, of course – and the final one-day match of last summer. Their all-time record is 10 international defeats on the trot."

Etheridge had hoped Morgan's century would spark England "but instead of providing some relief after two months of heartbreak and misery, the pain just got deeper. The tour has gone from bad to worse to absolutely appalling."

The looming run of international defeats was, according to Richard Hobson of The Times, "like a car crash in the making" before expressing wonderment at Australia's turnaround.

"When Australia won the final one-day international of the English summer, no one could imagine the riches it would herald. The self-belief gathered through the return Ashes has rubbed off on the 50-over personnel and was exemplified in the fearless way that the fresh-faced James Faulkner played hard and refused to give up."

The Daily Mail suggested a "13-0 tour annihilation" was on the cards, a result the paper declared "really would be the death of English cricket" and shouting "England are absolutely USELESS".

"Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Melbourne, Sydney and back to Melboune and Brisbane again - that's the sequence of cities to have witnessed the annihilation of England's wretched, pathetic and utterly useless cricketers this dark winter," wrote the Mail.

"The Aussies were teetering at 244 for nine and STILL England failed to claim victory as Ben Stokes and Tim Bresnan served up some cafeteria bowling at the death."

The Sun

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The Daily Mail

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The Telegraph

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The Times

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