All the hard work gone waste

As Eric Morecambe often asked: "What do you think of it so far?" The answer has got to be: "Rubbish".

The crazy thing about this game was that England had a lot of great performances. There was that fantastic partnership between Paul Collingwood and Kevin Pietersen, there was Matthew Hoggard's faultless bowling, and there was Andrew Flintoff's energetic captaincy.

Now all of that has been wasted, because of one mad session. I'm not surprised that England's players sat in the dressing room for a long time wondering what the hell happened.

There will be plenty of people in England asking the same question after they woke up expecting to see their team come away with a draw.

Make no mistake about it, the Ashes are gone. If you support England, don't kid yourself that they might come back. No England team in history have recovered from 2-0 down against Australia.

And let's face it, on current form, this is not a side capable of making history. The only explanation I can see for what happened in Adelaide on Tuesday is that England were complacent. The pitch was flat - so slow and easy to bat on that England thought all they had to do was turn up and bat out a draw.

What they forgot is that a Test match is played over five days, not four, and if you switch off even for a moment, the No 1 side in the world will nail you. If you work a nine-to-five job, and do it well from Monday to Thursday, the company will still go bankrupt if you screw up on Friday.

The same goes for a cricket team. Australia's cricket was impressive but it was not as if they were doing anything radical. They just kept bowling Shane Warne from one end, turning it out of the rough, and used the seamers to block up the other end and create pressure.

One-day overdose

The problem is that England, like a lot of teams, have become so used to playing crash-bang one-day cricket that Test matches don't come naturally to them anymore.

Most crucially, they have forgotten how to save a Test. This was a situation that cried out for some old-fashioned grit, but several of the batsmen had mental aberrations.

Take Pietersen, for instance. He was brilliant throughout his first innings. When Warne bowled into the rough outside his leg stump he stayed back and put his pads together like a sentry on point duty, so that there was no way through.

He never played the sweep shot and that was how he won the mental battle. On Tuesday, Pietersen went to sweep at the very first ball he faced from Warne and got bowled around his legs.

I don't know whether it was arrogance or pressure that led him to try that shot, but it landed England in a lot of trouble. As if that wasn't bad enough, Flintoff drove at a wide ball without moving his feet.

Then Geraint Jones flashed at a ball that was two foot wide and hit it to gully. It was as if they had stopped thinking cricket.