Someone has already suggested they were hearing extraordinary aerodynamic noise.
Who, after all, has any experience of the wind noise inside an A330 when it's mostly horizontal but going down at 10000 ft/min?
This crew was not up to the job in so many ways, but I'll forgive them this.
If the instrumentation did not present accurately the status of the aircraft then it was an instrumentation problem -- not the crew.
If the instrumentation did present the information accurately but the crew had not be trained to determine it, then it was an operational problem -- not the crew.
I find it hard to believe that the crew were so deficient -- and if they were, the 'blame' should rest with those who selected them, trained them and signed them off as fit.