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 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 preoccupied 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? Had Strauss been maintained as skipper, England could 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.

It is a desperately negative approach, which recalls similarly bamboozling selection 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.

England's batting collapse on the final day at Adelaide was horribly familiar, too. The first Ashes tour I followed was in 1990-91 and in Test after Test of that series, there was a ghastly inevitability to Bruce Reid ripping through the tourists' final five or six wickets while scarcely a handful of runs were added. Similarly, eight years later, England actually competed on more or less equal terms for maybe 90 percent of the first three matches; but threw it all away with shockingly rapid collapses, after which Australia would put on 200-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 made it probable, not possible.

England, on the other hand, were gripped by an absurd level of caution. They could have made the game safe on a still excellent surface simply by batting normally on the final day, 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 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. It was 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? He gave the desperately limited Giles over after over, employing just one slip and keeping 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 coach 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 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 18 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 wrote, 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 that experience in 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 in Adelaide?

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 but it will take a miracle to rescue this unhappy tour now.

English sport needs to find 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 - when was the last time you saw an English side in any of the three major sports playing with a smile on its face?). Meanwhile, those of us who love English sport, and yearn for it to succeed in the highest of company will carry on watching as the footballers, rugby players and cricketers continue to struggle.