Mark Stoneman looking to hit back in Melbourne - for both his own sake and England's

Questions still hang over Stoneman and his career. In light of England's defeat Down Under, the Surrey opener will be hoping he can still prove a point in the fourth Test

'It’s frustrating that there have been times out there when I feel I’ve belonged but I haven’t made the scores' (Getty)

You spend over a decade making your way in the county game. You fight your way to a first Test cap, earning your place through sheer weight of runs. You get a place on your first Ashes tour, fulfilling a dream you have held since childhood. And at the end of it all, this is the feeling you get.

England’s calamitous Ashes defeat can hardly be laid at the feet of Mark Stoneman, the Surrey opener whose tally of two half-centuries has not been bettered by any batsman on either side in this series. But the fact remains that England have lost the series, and like every member of the team, Stoneman is looking back on where it all went wrong, even in a series where things appear to have gone all right.

“The key there is ‘all right’,” he says. “Obviously at 3-0 down, ‘all right’ hasn’t been good enough. And it’s frustrating that there have been times out there when I feel I’ve belonged but I haven’t made the scores that are required in Test cricket.”

For a batsman who has got off to several good starts in his Test career, a failure to break 60, despite passing 50 three times, still threatens to cast a shadow over Stoneman’s Test career: a question mark he will never quite shake off until he makes that big score.

“In the first two games, we’ve made fifties, and they’ve made hundreds,” he says. “And in Perth, we made hundreds and they made double-hundreds. That’s been the difference.”

Clearly Stoneman is no stranger to big scores: ten centuries in the last three seasons testifies to that. And yet until he gets to those three figures, the doubts will still remain. His place may be secure for this series at least, but he has by no means secured it in the long-term. How to convert those promising starts into more substantial contributions?

“Just repeating things for longer,” he says. “Look at Steve Smith. He just kept repeating what he did. Any plan we had, he worked out how he was going to counter it or absorb it. He’s shown levels of patience and good attacking instincts and he just repeats. Simple, really.”

Of course, it is far harder to bat when you have just spent more than two days in the field. Stoneman spent most of Australia’s mammoth first innings in Perth fielding on the boundary, where he got a privileged insight into the inimitable charm of the Australian cricket crowd.

“They’re not the nicest people when you’re playing against them,” he says sheepishly. “It gives you a different take on the population when they’ve got a few ales down their neck. And the intensity of the cricket and the feel around it. Everyone knows what’s riding on it. It’s been great to be a part of, it’s just very disappointing about the results.”

Such candour is unlikely to endear him to the capacity Melbourne crowd that will be greeting Stoneman on Boxing Day. But like most Geordies, Stoneman is made of stern stuff, and is determined to face down whatever the Aussie quicks - and the Aussie crowd - can throw at him.

Mark Stoneman in action on the third day of the first Test (Getty)

“It’s one of the perks of being an opener,” he says. “It gets your beans going a bit, and you certainly know you’re in a contest. More often than not, if you can get through those periods then you can handle whatever else comes at you and make a good score. Unfortunately, so far, I haven’t quite gone on to make the bigger scores that would make a better contribution for the team.”

The first step for England is to obtain the win or draw that would prevent an ignominious whitewash. “The Aussies are going to be coming at us looking for 5-0,” Stoneman says. “So there’s the first thing we’ve got to stop. They’re not going to be serving up half-volleys for fun because they’re won the series, that’s for sure.”

The battle, it seems, is clearly still of paramount importance to Stoneman, and his comments about the Australian public are all the more striking in light of the fact that his wife Serene is Australian. “Aye, she’s all right,” Stoneman says, and with pride and an England place on the line, it is probably about as much of a concession as he is prepared to make right now.