Ashes to ashes, England to dust

What is it about English sportsmen? Why, when the going gets tough, do they time and again respond with the most stereotyped negativity: an approach which seems almost to invite their demise? The footballers' staggeringly cautious tactics in Germany saw them regarded as the laughing stock of the tournament; the rugby team became ever more narrow and predictable in the years following (and even the games immediately leading up to) their World Cup triumph; and this morning, the cricketers capped their own historically-trademarked propensity to collapse by somehow surrendering a position of apparent impregnability in Adelaide.

Laud Australia's astonishing fightback and the incomparable Shane Warne all you will: but they couldn't have done it without England. A lesson we all need to learn in life is to think and act positively: if we don't believe in ourselves, nobody else is likely to. Around the world, promising young sportsmen learn this earlier than most: for invariably, in order to rise to the top in highly competitive sporting environs, they have to fight for all they are worth. Yet when English sportsmen fight, too often it isn't through a mentality of "the best form of defence is attack", but by adopting a dour, joyless approach which results inevitably in defeat.

The saddest thing about England's capitulation is that, after more than a decade of kow-towing to Australian dominance, they finally appeared to have absorbed this lesson only last year. The bouncer which Stephen Harmison bowled to Matthew Hayden in the very first ball of the 2005 Ashes series at Lord's, and especially the astonishing, tide-turning accumulation of over 400 runs on the first day at Edgbaston, served notice to the opposition: this time, England weren't in the least bit intimidated, and were very much up for the battle. Such was the speed of their run-scoring, they managed to elevate a strategy developed by their opponents' brilliantly inventive captain, Mark Taylor, in the mid-1990s, to still another level: and Australia were shocked almost into submission as a result.

Yet on this tour, and even allowing for the absence of Michael Vaughan, Simon Jones and Marcus Trescothick, they have reverted to type, hoping for things to work out rather than making them happen. Like Nasser Hussain's notorious, craven decision to insert Australia at Brisbane four years ago, Harmison's opening ball in the First Test betrayed nothing but panic; and Duncan Fletcher's misguided belief in Ashley Giles and Geraint Jones suggests he is wedded to the past - what worked in 2005 - rather than the future.

Make no mistake: all sporting teams end up reflecting the approach of their leader. Hussain made England hard to beat, but Vaughan was the man whose creative, original approach took them to another level. In Australia, their bewildering reversion stems from muddled and simply wrong-headed thinking from Fletcher: which started when Andrew Flintoff was preferred as captain to Andrew Strauss. Alec Stewart was hopelessly compromised eight years ago when expected to captain, keep wicket and open the batting: and England only started playing to their potential when he at last handed over the gloves to Warren Hegg, leaving him far more able to focus his energies on scoring much-needed runs. Captaining an international cricket team is so demanding that it invariably exhausts most asked to do the job: which is why the admirable Flintoff, already arguably England's most important player, should never have been asked to lead the side on top of spearheading the attack and batting at number six.

Hardly surprisingly, Flintoff's batting has suffered as a result: and his captaincy has scarcely been inspired either. To make matters worse, the choice of the big-hearted Lancastrian made it almost impossible to go in with a team confident of producing the lower-order runs Fletcher seems so pre-occupied with. Surely no other international team would prefer an innocuous, insipid off-spinner like Giles to an erratic, but far more threatening one like Monty Panesar, and a palpably inferior wicketkeeper like Jones over a genuinely top-quality one like Chris Read, simply because they are thought likely to score more runs? Would Australia drop Glenn McGrath because of inadequacies in his batting or fielding? Hardly. Yet had Strauss been maintained as skipper, England could surely have selected the following side, which would have been more dangerous in attack as well as enjoying a much sturdier tail:

Strauss (capt), Cook, Bell, Pietersen, Collingwood, Joyce, Flintoff, Read, Harmison, Hoggard, Panesar

And of course, there would have been the option of bringing in either James Anderson or preferably Sajid Mahmood for Ed Joyce as and when the conditions demanded it. But no case could possibly be made for playing only four bowlers and making Flintoff skipper: hence the preference of Giles and Jones, which has wasted potentially rich assets in Read and especially Panesar, and done heaven knows what to the morale and motivation of both too.

It is a desperately negative approach, which recalls similarly bamboozling selectorial decisions of the past: notably when England all but threw away any chance they had of regaining the urn by leaving Phil Tufnell at home for the 1998/9 tour. Laughably, they were left with only the moderate Peter Such to face the hosts on a spinners' paradise at Sydney: and although England played magnificently for much of that game, it may not have been a coincidence that the three-to-one ratio of slow bowlers in the two teams (Australia fielding Warne, Stuart MacGill and Colin Miller) was also reflected in the final, wholly justified outcome of that series.

And England's batting collapse on the final day at Adelaide was horribly familiar too. The first Ashes tour I followed was in 1990/1: and in Test after Test of that series, there was a ghastly inevitabilty to Bruce Reid ripping through the tourists' final five or six wickets while scarcely a handful of runs had been added. Similarly, eight years later, England actually competed on more or less equal terms for maybe 90% of the first three matches; but threw it all away with shockingly rapid collapses, after which Australia would put on two hundred plus runs in next to no time, and bat England right out of the game.

Why? One can only conclude that it's all in the mind. However unlikely it must have seemed, the Australian dressing room believed that an implausible victory in Adelaide was, actually, perfectly possible: and the brilliance of Warne promptly made it beckon. England, on the other hand, were gripped by an absurd level of caution. The tourists could have made the game safe on a still excellent surface simply by batting normally yesterday, and adding say 240 runs over the first three hours: yet incredibly, their run rate slowed to that of a snail. The incessant desire to block, block, block simply invited pressure, and made the fall of wickets seem all but inevitable. It would have hardly been reckless for the batsmen to give bad balls the treatment they warranted, and keep the total ticking over: indeed, such a basic approach would never have allowed the pressure to develop as it did.

And bewilderingly, once seven or eight wickets were down, Paul Collingwood - who had a magnificent match overall, and like Matthew Hoggard, certainly did not deserve to be on the losing side - continued to block, and pick up the very occasional single, rather than look to score the quick runs which by this point had become England's only realistic hope. Australia showed how easy it was to score quickly when rapidly chasing their inadequate target down: but then, Australian cricketers invariably think positively. Unlike England's: and with it blindingly obvious to all and sundry that attempting to slow the hosts' run rate down could not possibly suffice, and that the only way of saving or winning the game lay in taking quick wickets, what did Flintoff do but give the desperately limited Giles over after over, employ just one slip, and keep most of the other fielders back, so allowing Ricky Ponting and Michael Hussey the chance to pick off ones and twos as a matter of routine?

Confused, indecisive, wrong-headed, negative. So much of it stems from Fletcher: whose continued justification of Giles and Jones' selections after the game make him seem more and more like cricket's answer to Sven-Goran Eriksson. Indeed, one of the great ironies in all this is the sense that, when England's sporting bodies look overseas for guidance, and a bold, new approach, what they get are individuals who become so infected by the caution endemic in English sport that they end up more conservative and more English than the English themselves.

Fletcher's reign as coach is now, surely, almost at an end; and his team now face the prospect of real humiliation. Australia have threatened the prospect of a 5-0 whitewash on a number of occasions over the past eighteen years: but it has arguably never seemed as likely as it does now. Flintoff's men are shell-shocked, and unlike after Brisbane, will scarcely be able to reassure themselves with positives taken out of the game: instead, there is every chance that Adelaide 2006 will, as the wonderful Gideon Haigh writes today, come to torment and fester in English cricketing minds every bit as much as Headingley 1981 did in the heads of Australians. The baggy greens have always been vulnerable when chasing small targets ever since what happened to them at Leeds: and how can England ever feel confident of a first-innings total, no matter how great, being enough after the nightmare they have endured here?

Warne, McGrath, Ponting and company, meanwhile, are cock-a-hoop, and can impose a new, lasting strangulation over the Poms by rubbing their noses firmly in the mire in the three matches which remain. It could all have been so different; it will take a miracle to rescue this unhappy tour now. And until English sport finds the courage to confront its demons, and set out on a bold, new, revolutionary path embracing risk, change, optimism, and sheer enjoyment (a good word, that: for when was the last time you saw an English side in any of the three major sports playing with a smile on its face?) of competition, more woe for the footballers, rugby players and cricketers - and for all of us who love English sport, and yearn for it to succeed in the highest of company - is surely inevitable in the years ahead.