Credit should go to England think-tank

If we thought that Adelaide was the perfect Test performance from England then we have had to think again. This has been better.

Just when you thought that England could not bowl better after their first-innings performance here at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG), they have done so in Australia's second innings. First time they had a typical English pitch to exploit but yesterday the wicket was flat and the bowlers responded with a display of great skill.

Discipline sums it up. And thinking. England have such good people around the team that they just seem to be getting better and better. I have always been a massive fan of Andy Flower and the direction he has brought to the England team, and Andrew Strauss is now executing tactical plans perfectly.

The captain has had an exceptional game.

Having a man on the drive, for instance, worked to dismiss Mike Hussey and then, when Graeme Swann went round the wicket to Michael Clarke and Strauss placed himself in the gully, that worked perfectly too.

Swann may not yet have taken the wickets in this series that everyone expected but he has given England control and allowed Strauss to rotate and rest his seamers at the other end.

If I were Ryan Harris, who suffered a stress fracture of the ankle yesterday, I would be saying to my captain: "Where is our spinner to allow us to have a break?"

England are ticking every box. How long have we wanted a reliable No 3 in the order? We have got a world-class one now in Jonathan Trott.

We spoke to David Saker, the bowling coach, on interview on Tuesday morning and he told us that at the MCG it was a question of bowling down an off-stump channel in the first innings and waiting for the nicks, and then to bowl much straighter second time around to aim for lbws and drag-ons. So what happened? Exactly what he said would happen.

Reverse swing

Reverse swing is something that Saker, like Cooley and Ottis Gibson before him, would have worked closely on with his bowlers and England got the ball to reverse very quickly on Tuesday, after something like 10 overs of the Aussie innings.

When I was England captain we would have loads of meetings about reverse swing and while Darren Gough would have one theory as to how to gain it, Andrew Caddick would have another. There were too many ideas flying around, to be honest.

England now have a very clear way of going about it and it seems as though Jimmy Anderson is the man who, perfectly legally, works on the ball to try to get it to reverse while Alastair Cook has the job of looking after the ball to gain conventional swing.

There is such clarity of thought and delegation of duties.

Tim Bresnan was under a lot of pressure here, coming in for the leading wicket-taker in the series in Steven Finn in one of the biggest Tests England have played in years for his first bowl of the series. Yet he gave them control, economy and now wickets.

He has simply got better under this regime and, at 25, can improve further. This was as well as I have ever seen him bowl.

The roles may have been reversed in this Ashes series but if England think the job is done they will be in for a rude awakening from Flower. And that is how it should be when you are striving for such high standards.