5 things England needs to do to prepare for the Ashes

4. Prepare against swing:

In the warm-up game against Somerset, Australian seamers Mitchell Starc and James Pattinson extracted prodigious swing with the second new ball and knocked over six wickets for no runs in 29 deliveries.

England’s batsmen will have to develop methods to counter this threat as well as the danger posed by reverse swinging of the old ball. One method could be that of stepping out to hit the quick bowlers over the in-field, as Ian Bell did against Ishant Sharma in their 2008 tour of India.

Another most important thing to practice is getting to the pitch of the delivery; you can negate the swing to some extent if you do that. Fortunately, England have a good set of swing bowlers themselves, and so the batsmen should look to get in some solid preparation at the nets plus in their final warm-up game against Essex.