"There's areas that we probably know we need to address from cricket points of view, but also from probably cultural points of view as well," Cross said. "This review, I don't know what's going to come of it, but I'm hoping that these are the things that will get addressed, and pave the way for the next generation to want to play for England."

"Ultimately I feel like we might've lost a few fans in the last couple of months, which is really sad from our point of view," Cross added. "I think the 2023 Ashes was how good it can be and the 2025 Ashes how bad it can be."

Cross brought a unique perspective to her evaluation of the tour, having travelled with a bulging disc in her back, which ultimately kept her sidelined throughout despite repeated attempts to prove her fitness to play.

"It was unprecedented how poorly we performed over there, I don't think anyone probably anticipated the Ashes turning out the way it did, and obviously there was a huge disappointment that came with that," Cross said.

"As a group of players now, we don't know what's going to come of this review that's happening at the moment, but I think it motivates you to be a better group of players and a better, I guess, version of yourself."

"My reflections on my trip were quite unusual. I didn't get to play a game of cricket, but as a 33-year-old getting ruled out of an Ashes series was devastating. So I feel like it's made me really think about how I want to manage my career now moving forwards and, with the new structure of the tiers in the counties, I'm hoping that I'll be so well supported with that, that that wasn't my last Ashes hopefully.

"Ultimately as players, we still want to try and get young girls interested in the game and us losing quite drastically isn't going to do that. So we're going to have to have a real look at how we want to portray ourselves as a team moving forward and try and get a bit of love back from our fans because we, or certainly I, felt that we kind of lost a lot of that from our Ashes series, so hopefully we can move in the right direction now."

Cross was speaking at the launch of the Professional Cricketers' Association Women's Impact Report, highlighting advances made in the game since 2020. That progress includes equal domestic minimum salaries of 28,000 for men and women from this season, where women's teams have been aligned with the men's in a three-tiered county-based structure.

But more work remains to be done, including addressing the salary gap between genders in the Hundred, which widened rather than closed this year. While the leading earners in the men's competition will earn 200,000, an increase of 60%, the top earners in the women's game will earn 65,000, up 30%. The base salary for men went up by 1,000 on last year to 31,000 compared to the women, who went from 8,000 to 10,000.

"I would hope to see that it happens quite quickly, especially with how vocal the players were about the pay gap getting bigger," Cross said. "It was obviously a disappointment, but I'm always of the bigger picture, that the Hundred has done a lot for the women's game. It continues to do that. It puts us in a spotlight that we've never had before in the domestic game.

"So as disappointing as those headlines are, there's still a lot of great stuff and there's a lot more money coming into the game now and hopefully that'll get pushed in the right direction and the gender play gap will continue to get smaller rather than get bigger."

A PCA working group will lobby the ECB on various aspects of the Hundred, which will receive a huge injection of funds through private investment from next season.

Daryl Mitchell, PCA chief executive, said: "From our side, I think particularly the announcement of the salaries took us a little bit by surprise this time around, I think the communication needs to improve, particularly in that sort of announcement. What we were shown in October actually, at the players' summit, was very different in terms of salary bands to what was actually produced and put out publicly.

"There's been some pretty robust discussions about that process, it's fair to say, over the last couple of months. The ECB have stated it was an interim year with the sale of the Hundred franchises with a view to increase the salaries across the board next year. There's a lot of things to work through."