England have to be okay to not be okay with losing

In a deleted scene from Ridley Scott's epic Gladiator, Russell Crowe cuts the head off his opponent before bellowing: "You win and you learn. You try not to get too high or too low. It was my day today, but Maximus is a great player and he'll be back stronger."

Maximus is dead, Russell.

Was this a successful tour of the West Indies for England? Publicly, the message is of a successful exercise. A narrow loss in the ODI series with a new group of players, backed up with a spirited comeback in the T20I series before falling to a 3-2 defeat. This was about learning as much as winning, and the fact they cracked the Caribbean code after going 2-0 down, realising at that point that they had to fight "fire with fire" and then won two of the following three is brilliant.

But the fact is that England lost. It's over. And if winning is a habit, so too is losing. There have been eight matches this tour and England have lost five of them. And there have been two deciders on this tour and England have lost both of them.

"It's a newish group and it needs to be treated like that," coach Matthew Mott said ahead of the series decider. "We try and set them up to perform as best they can and then, particularly in T20, sometimes the results are completely out of your control. So if you can keep that mindset and keep trying to get the best out of people around you, I don't think you're really concerned by the win/loss as much."

The argument that this T20 group is a new one is borderline gaslighting. Eight of the England players on the pitch today were in the starting XI for the World Cup final last year. Ten of the 11 have played in the IPL, with Rehan Ahmed the only exception.

For all the talk that individual results can be outside of your control, that was not the case today. On a pitch where 150 would have been highly competitive, England contrived to turn 110 for 4 with more than five overs to go into 132 all out. Get to 150-plus and fall victim to a successful West Indies chase after they won the toss, then fair play. But that's not what happened. That England forced it to the final over is testament to their spirit as a unit, but also that they had really mucked it up with their batting.

"Really proud of our efforts," Mott said to TNT Sports after play. "There was different types of conditions throughout [the series]. We really couldn't have got too many more lessons out of this tour."

This is a group being judged on the standard of a difficult ODI World Cup, as opposed to the standard of being the reigning world champions - as it should be. And it's for that reason that the messaging rankles. This is an excellent England team that has fallen to a series defeat and were a Harry Brook world-record over from losing 4-1. The margins are fine. But England have consistently been on the wrong side of them. They have played three T20I series since their World Cup win and failed to win any of them.

Of course, balancing public praise with private criticism is a famously difficult task. No-one is expecting Mott or Jos Buttler to come out and slam their team, but emphasise over and over that defeat is okay and the intensity of the contest that you are competing in will wane.

One of cricket's biggest problems is that it spends its life playing series simply as preparation for the next. Today England were competing in a series decider having come back from 2-0 down. If, even in this context, winning was secondary to learning, then what are we doing here? The phrase is carpe diem, not carpe cras.

It's furthermore a public message that sits at odds with the private sentiment. Elite athletes care about winning and losing. After the second T20I, Moeen Ali was visibly irritated. After the third, Phil Salt acknowledged that "no team in the world is happy losing games" and that England had felt "under the gun".

"I was so excited to turn up here because it was basically like a final and those are the games you want to play in and be on the right side of," Reece Topley said shortly after the match finished. "There was some amazing cricket played over the five games. It is gutting. There's a lot of talk about Test cricket being the priority… [but] the bottom line is you want to win this series, especially as a player where white-ball cricket is my Test cricket, so I want to win every series I can for England."

It's okay to not be okay with losing. During the ODI World Cup, Ben Stokes curried enormous favour for his honest assessment that England had "been c*ap". There is of course the counter argument that it would be unhealthy for players to mentally invest so much into every match they play. The highs would be too high and the lows too low in a format as volatile as T20. But for sport as entertainment to shrug its shoulders as "we learnt" when falling to a dramatic defeat - who's that helping? Are you not entertained? Not really, no-one appears to care.

This has not been a disastrous series for England by any means and it is true that they will benefit greatly from five matches in these conditions when the World Cup rolls around in six months' time. Salt has been a revelation, Liam Livingstone's move to No. 4 looks perfect, Adil Rashid has been a magician, and Topley has been brilliant. But they lost. And that can't cease to matter.