The horror, the horror: day three at Sydney

This is the lowest moment I can ever remember as an England cricket supporter. In thirty years of following the team, I have witnessed humiliations, degradations, and abject disappointments – but nothing on the scale of what happened today, and in fact over the entire last six weeks.

In other Ashes drubbings of recent times, at least we could console ourselves with the knowledge that we were losing to one of the great sides in the pantheon of test cricket. Not this time. On other tours, we’d usually rally at some point to achieve a consolation victory. Not this time. It simply could not be bleaker.

Our only solace is that the series is finally over. There is no more pain for us to suffer. No longer must we awake every morning in sheer terror of checking the score, only to discover that it’s worse than even our most pessimistic nightmares.

There will be huge amounts of anger and vitriol directed at the England players, but I cannot join in. It may not be a popular view, but I feel sorry for them, and for Alastair Cook in particular. I mean, would you like to be in his shoes right now?

Tonight the squad will have slunk miserably back to their hotel, knowing they are in disgrace, only too aware of the utter and diabolical nature of their failure – perfectly conscious of the degree to which, to their perception, they have let everybody down.

Our team did not implode because the players did not care or did not try. Matt Prior, for example, rode twenty thousand miles on his exercise bike to prepare physically for this trip, and look what good it did him. Uniquely among disastrous England tours, there have been no reports of excess drinking or partying. No evidence has emerged of a lack of commitment.

It’s probable that our players lacked focus and hunger, which is rather different. And they were helped not one bit by the back-to-back staging of these series, with us away second – a factor which too few pundits have considered. But in the main, the cricket gods simply decreed that everything, at every stage, would go wrong for us – even down to broken bats. Bit by bit, poor session by poor session, the squad’s confidence and self-esteem irreversibly unravelled at a frightening speed.

Confidence – an impossible ingredient to confect from a vacuum – is the simplest and therefore most compelling explanation for our batsmen’s bewilderingly acute lack of runs. Each night we went to bed thinking – this innings can’t be as bad as the others, can it? Surely we’re due some runs now at last? The answers to those questions, very starkly, were an emphatic yes and no.

You can’t disregard the effectiveness of the Australians as a factor in our travails. But unlike many, what I find hard to swallow is the common allegation that our batsmen lacked courage and fight. Surely, test match batting is primarily about judgement – what the player sees, and what he decides to do, in the 0.4 of a second they have between the ball’s delivery and its arrival – than either guts or good intentions. You don’t miss a ball because you don’t care (and what batman doesn’t want to make runs?) but because you make a misjudgement – and our batsmen have made dozens of those over the last six weeks. A fairer analysis would be to say they’re not good enough.

Cook’s men did try to fight with the bat. But whenever they attempted to play positively, and take the game to the bowlers, it went drastically wrong. And whenever they opted instead to dig in and tough it out, it also went wrong – and they were castigated for shotlessness and stagnation.

As early as the third day at Adelaide, I posted on Facebook the question “five-nil?”. I derive no pleasure from my prescience, but ultimately our defeat in South Australia guaranteed the eventual whitewash – a scoreline also predicted by www.bwin.com. As Perth would always bring defeat, the reality was that after Adelaide we would head to Melbourne and Sydney buried under a mountain of momentum. Australia’s confidence, and our own disintegrating mental state, made the outcome inevitable.

In fairness to this team, it’s worth pointing out that only narrowly have we escaped five-nil on many previous trips to Australia. In 1998/99, it took a monsoon on the last day at Brisbane, and a miracle catch by Mark Ramprakash at Melbourne, to avoid that scoreline. In 2002/3, we went into the Sydney test four-nil down – but were reprieved by the absence through injury at the SCG of both McGrath and Warne. It’s not for nothing that Australia almost always win at home, even when weak, and remember too that since 2001 every Ashes series has been won by the home side, with the sole exception of our triumph in 2010/11.

If you were to pick out two passages of play which, in particular, condemned us to our fate, you’d probably select our collapses in the first innings at Adelaide, and the second in Melbourne. In hindsight, we were always going to lose at Sydney – not least because we fielded a team of rookies, in a bearpit, against 90mph bowlers, on a lively pitch which also took turn, but in the absence of both Swann and Panesar. What would you have thought a year ago at the idea of our XI for Sydney including Carberry, Stokes (then unknown), Ballance, Borthwick and Rankin. I doubt you’d have bet on an England win.

None of which, admittedly, explains or leavens the failings of the experienced batting pros, and unavoidable though defeat may have been, the manner and scale of it is still a brutal shock. Regardless of inquests and debates over coaching staff, the real question surrounds how deeply this will scar all the players involved in the long term – and whether Australian jubilation will remain merely a consolation prize for this ageing bunch of journeymen, or inspire a genuine rebirth which will torment us for a generation.