“We just want to put in a good performance,” Knight said. “I think probably we haven’t done that so far … well, I don’t think we’ve done it in our last few ODIs, to be honest. So yeah, you’re striving for that perfect performance aren’t you, and trying to put all facets of the game together. We want to finish this leg of the summer really well.”
But Knight also revealed there’s more at stake for England’s players, namely trying out new things in the glare of the international spotlight.
Dunkley was listed on the team sheet at No. 12 in Taunton, having made a century, a fifty and an unbeaten 48 for South East Stars in the 50-over Rachael Heyhoe Flint Trophy.
“The amount of work that she did, around not just her technical stuff, but around her mental side of things and having a bit of a pre-ball routine, there’s no doubt that those things would pay off eventually, they just didn’t pay off for her in New Zealand,” Knight said. “It has been really great to see Dunks going away and getting runs, that’s exactly what we wanted her to do.
“Lauren Bell is tweaking something technically with her bowling and she’s doing it in games, which is a really hard thing to do and it can affect your output a little bit as well. But the girls are really good at seeing it as long-term progress and in order to be it in the future you have to kind of do it in the here and now.”
Knight added that learning on the hop was a growing facet of the women’s game amid an increasingly busy schedule, which culminates this year in the T20 World Cup in Bangladesh followed by the 2025 ODI event in India.
“With the amount of cricket we now play, there’s not huge blocks where you can go and really hone your game and improve those things technically, so it’s important that we keep trying to move forward as cricketers, and then sometimes you do have to do it in games,” she said. “That’s really a tricky thing to do and I think it’s really brave thing to do, and it’s a philosophy of us as a group that we want to keep moving forward. To do that sometimes you might have to maybe go backwards little bit, to then make a huge leap forward.”
“As a bowling unit, I think the girls were quite disappointed with the other day, it was a little bit scrappy and not quite up to our best,” Knight said of the first ODI in Derby, where England were unable to take the final wicket to bowl Pakistan out. “We had some really good conversations about trying to put it right today. I thought the control that Kate showed and then Lauren at the other end just making things happen, it felt like there was a lot going on. With a few chances, we felt like we should have had a couple of on the board.”
