MO: I LET ENGLAND DOWN

MOEEN ALI has opened up on his Ashes failure and admitted he flopped during the 4-0 thrashing by Australia.

The England all-rounder said: “I feel I did not perform and I feel like I let the team down, the fans down.

“That was the most disappointing thing for me – it was my biggest fear.

“And the harder I tried the worse it was getting.”

Primarily a batsman, Moeen (right) has been playing as England’s first-choice spinner.

Yet the 30-year-old Brummie could not have had a much worse series, averaging 19 with the bat and 115 with the ball. But he has bounced back well at the start of the one-day series.

Moeen struck the winning runs in Melbourne and crucially took 1-39 in his first 10-over stint to help repair his shattered confidence.

“It’s not that you are not scoring runs or not getting wickets in the Tests,” he said.

“It’s just that you feel as an individual you are letting your team-mates down.

“It has been a very tough tour and when your confidence is low, you are trying to perform the best you can n but it’s not happening, it is disappointing.

“When you lose a bit of confidence in your own game, sometimes you try harder and it can be that the harder you try the worse it gets. That’s what was happening. You try everything – different approaches going into bat, be positive, but nothing really came off for me.“The ODI series though can lift a weight off his shoulders and with the IPL auction to look forward to for the first timc time, a bout of white-ball cricket is just what Moeen needs. He said: “The thing you have to realise is that bad performances don’t make you a bad player. It really comes from inside yourself. “It was nice to move to a different format of the game because the pressure is less, if that makes sense.”