Women’s Ashes: What have England learned from their tour of South Africa?

In the bowling department, Lauren Filer is the most exciting asset England possess.

Against South Africa, she did not take a particularly high volume of wickets (eight across all three formats) but Filer is proof that fast bowling is not defined by numbers alone.

She regularly rattled the batters with her fiery short ball, making them duck and sway or back away from their stumps when it was fired in fuller.

The predicament England have is whether they can fit Filer and Lauren Bell in the same white-ball side. While Bell took eight wickets in her player of the match performance in the Test, both can be inconsistent in the shorter format which leads to a lack of control.

They have not often played together, only in two ODIs where they took three wickets between them with an economy of 5.7 for Filer and 6.4 for Bell.

But in the three T20s they have played, they were more effective with nine wickets between them with Filer averaging 36 and Bell an impressive 10.6.

Kate Cross has had a stellar year in ODIs, with 19 wickets at an average of 18 and best figures of 6-30, and is likely to slot straight back in if she recovers from the back spasms which cut short her South Africa tour.

“The Bell or Filer question could come down to the conditions. If it’s a green seamer then they might have to drop a spinner so they can play them both and Cross,” former England batter Lydia Greenway told the BBC Test Match Special podcast.

“You could see in the first ODI [v South Africa] when they played both Bell and Filer, they did look vulnerable.

“If one of them has a bad day, I don’t think you can rely too much on the other one, certainly not as much as you can with Kate Cross so they always have to play her.

“For me now, as long as she’s fit, they have to go with Filer because she can be the big point of difference, especially in somewhere like Australia.”