England embark on Ashes inquest

Cricket: Both on and off the field and in the results of the play in this and in other matches, the superiority of the Australian team was never severely challenged.

They proved themselves beyond doubt the better combination, better and more reliable with the bat, better and more dependable in the field with better and more suitable bowling equipment for Australian conditions of play.

If that sounds even more pompous than usual, then that is the Sydney Morning Herald for you, in March 1921, in the immediate aftermath of the only previous whitewash - administered upon England by Warwick Armstrong's side - in the history of the Ashes. Nothing much changes, does it.

Some things will have to, though, if England are to recapture the Ashes two years hence and establish themselves at the top of the tree, the objective set out in the mission statement of the then England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) chairman Lord MacLaurin some years since.

Retirements of key players, particularly their two bowling geniuses, mean the Australians will fall back closer to if not into the pack, and anyone who has seen some of the play, for example, in the series between South Africa and India will realise that in spite of this result England are a match for anyone else.

Already, though, the machinery is being put into motion to ensure that such a debacle as has been witnessed these past few weeks (and which is sure to carry on through the coming weeks of one-day cricket) does not happen again.

Even as the teams were preparing for play on what inevitably proved the last day here, a quorum of the ECB's executive committee, the body with overall responsibility for delivering the board's strategic plans, was meeting at a Sydney hotel to discuss the immediate setting up of a full-scale inquest into not just the tour itself but the whole structure of the England set-up and its relationship with the counties.

The intention is to deliver the most robust, stringent overhaul and streamlining of the way in which the international game in England is prosecuted. There will be a number of jobs on the line.

One of these may be that of the coach, Duncan Fletcher, who has in seven years taken the England side from a laughing stock to the adulation in Trafalgar Square. He has been a brilliant coach, bringing solid business practice and cricketing expertise to the structure of the team and its environment, and gradually the players have responded.

But the pinnacle was that day at The Oval 16 months ago. Since then, persistent injuries and illness have disrupted the team that was forged, and if from that have emerged talents such as Alastair Cook, Monty Panesar and Paul Collingwood, then it cannot compensate for the loss of the most potent pace attack that England has ever possessed or its cussed captain.

For the manner in which the team were prepared (or not) for this series, Fletcher must take responsibility, and also for the strategies and selections. Each of these is open to debate, but he has responsibility to get it right.

The timing of his departure, though, would be a sensitive issue. He is a full-time ECB employee, on a four-year rolling contract, and, at an estimated quarter of a million pounds a year, will be expensive to unseat.

His business in Australia is not finished until the one-day series ends early next month and then the World Cup.

Still, though, we come back to the Sydney Morning Herald and its assertion of 86 years ago. To beat Australia last time, England needed to be at the top of their game and the opposition off theirs; they needed good fortune, and good health. To take them on in Australia they needed all this and more. Instead they found an opponent so focused, so utterly dedicated to exacting not just revenge but the infliction of humiliation that even England's best side at its peak might not have been enough second time around.

Ricky Ponting and his side demonstrated team play in excelsis, where every man did his job, and the whole became greater than the sum of its parts. Each time England asked a stern question (and there were occasions), an Australian answered and some. And that, in what was an extraordinary performance, is the most extraordinary thing of all. Guardian Service