I saw enough from our bowling attack to say that an inform group, in rhythm, with miles in the legs, could bowl England out cheaply fairly consistently. The lack of red ball practice really affected Shamar in particular and Alzarri (though I have my doubts about him anyway). Roach missing was irritating but given his overseas record, not a huge loss.
But we have a batting crisis. The result against Australia paved over some large cracks because Hodge, Da Silva and Sinclair scraped enough runs together for the bowlers to work with.
More often than not, prep or no prep, that batting lineup will fail. It's just not good enough. England's attack is very impressive, credit where it's due, and we did not even look like combatting it outside of one innings at Trent Bridge. If we want to grow as a test side, beyond just better prep, we need to do something drastic with our batting. If we acknowledge that we lose a lot of batters to white ball cricket, it's really those guys that we need to compromise with, so at least our most talented batsmen are playing, for better or for worse. In particular, King and Pooran. I'd reach out to Hety and see if he will go on some sort of A programme with a view to accelerating his reintroduction to the test team. Obviously, these are short term fixes, unlikely to change much. Ultimately, pitches and facilities need to be better and we need a regional focus on developing red ball batsmen. What we saw here and in Australia for the most part wasn't good enough.