Australian coach Matthew Mott has taken a swipe at England's slow-batting tactics throughout their four-day Ashes Test, which ended in a tame draw an hour early on Sunday night.
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Only 21 wickets fell on a lifeless wicket in the first Test these sides have played since mid-2015, a match Australia only had to win to retain the Ashes they won two years ago. The series now progresses to three T20 games, with England needing to win all of those to take back the urn.
Openers Lauren Winfield and Tammy Beaumont set the tone early, the former dismissed for just four runs off 56 balls. Beaumont top-scored for her side and finished with 70 from 173, but it wasn't until midway through the first session on day two that Australia had the chance to bat.
Ellyse Perry scored an unbeaten 213 as the home side piled on the runs before declaring at 9-448, giving themselves three-and-a-half sessions to bowl out the visitors, who stubbornly survived to stay alive in the series.
Captain Heather Knight finished unbeaten on 79 in the second innings, soaking up 220 balls and vindicating England's earlier tactics that allowed them to keep the series alive.
"Both teams have got to be honest about whether they were trying to win the Test match," Mott said.
"To bat with pretty minimal intent on day one when you get the best of conditions, if you're going to sit back and say that you're trying to win the Test is probably not in my realms of thinking. We certainly would've been disappointed with that scoring rate on day one, that slowed the whole Test match up and made it difficult to get 20 wickets for boths teams.
"That backed us into a bit of a corner with the game taking a slow path. So we had to bat big in that first innings and get right ahead and then roll the dice that we could get 10 wickets and probably not have to bat again. It certainly wasn't the way that we wanted to play the Test.
"I'm pretty sure if there was maybe a bit more grass on it day one and two, [that would have] got the game the first innings through a bit quicker then we might've seen that result."
Both sides expressed their displeasure at the state of the North Sydney Oval wicket following the drawn match, which attracted more than 12,000 fans over the four days.
Curator Peter Devlin produced the pitch two days early in a bid to try and combat the rain that was forecast for the latter stages of last week, but the rain never came.
From the outset there was very little life in the wicket, and bowlers from both sides struggled to extract much in the way of bounce and movement from the dry pitch.
The pink ball was also relentlessly drubbed into lifelessness, and softened and darkened significantly throughout the contest.
"Ultimately we want to play on better wickets ... the biggest disappointment is it wasn't a fresh wicket, which I don't get for this one-off Test, pink ball and we haven't got a fresh wicket," England coach Mark Robinson said.
"You've got a young leg spinner [Amanda-Jade Wellington] she needs bounce. You've got [Ellyse] Perry, [Katherine] Brunt, I take my hat off to [Megan] Schutt, all of them, they run in hard and then sometimes you want them to deserve better.
"We've made such big strides for the women's game and maybe there's one or two strides still to go.
"I got told by the groundsman we were playing on the same wicket too. Whether they've got anything up their sleeves, I don't know."
Despite the lack of life in the wicket, Robinson said the Test match had still been a success for the women's game.
"I was sat on the edge [of my seat] yesterday unfortunately having to watch Ellyse Perry relentlessly go on in her quest of excellence, which it was, and I actually felt like I was in something special again and it reminded me of the day at Lord's [the World Cup final]," Robinson said.
"It was a special day to have nearly 4000 there for a pink-ball Test match to watch a player relentlessly go on.
"Yes we'll talk about the wicket and we should play on better wickets but hopefully that'll show the ICC and a lot of other people that there is an appetite for Test match cricket.
"We've got to understand our product don't we, we've got to entertain people. We want all of these 12,000 to come back."
