This will be an absolutely gut-wrenching time for England. When you set out to compete in a big series and are then just blown away like they have been here in Australia, it is really disappointing for all concerned.
This is the third Ashes tour in a row where England have been comprehensively beaten — I was involved in the middle one —– so there has to be something intrinsically wrong.
Questions will be asked in England. Essentially, is the county competition producing players able to jump up to Test level, particularly away from home? The answer is obviously ‘no’ so it’s a question of doing something about it.
Andrew Strauss is the ideal man to save English cricket after the gut-wrenching Ashes tour
Straus (R) pictured here alongside Trevor Bayliss during the 2017-18 Ashes series
The need for change is such that I cannot see England solving problems overnight, or with a couple of tweaks here and there. Whatever changes are made to the system will take time to bear fruit.
Much of what England had wanted to do ahead of this trip was right. For instance, Chris Silverwood wanted to come here with bowlers of extra pace but injury cost him two players he wanted to use — Jofra Archer, a huge miss, and Olly Stone.
I wanted to do the same four years ago but there was no Archer or Stone then and Mark Wood was a young bloke who was injured anyway. Unfortunately there weren’t many others with pace of a high enough calibre for us to pick and that is again something to work on now.
Wood has been terrific in Australia. He bowled really well without taking the wickets he deserved earlier in the series. In Hobart, he showed that if you have extra pace you can shake up any batter, as long as you have the skill to put the ball in the right place.
Australia always seem to have two or three bowlers offering pace and bounce, not just one, and always have the ruthlessness you need to show with the ball.
Strauss led England's revival in white-ball cricket and could do the same for the red-ball game
But batting has been the big problem for England and I go back to that question of tempo and a positive mindset.
Yes, you do have to have a good defence to succeed in Test cricket but you have to be in the right frame of mind to take every opportunity to score. It just looked like we were — sorry, England were, I should say —in two minds on how to play.
There always seem to be thousands of words said
