After England have won the first two Ashes Tests the press (and perhaps particularly the Australian press) have assumed the teams are ill-matched and the rest of the double-header series (three here, five down under in the winter) is a forgone conclusion. This may be premature. England won comprehensively at Lords and by a whisker at Trent Bridge. Had things worked out only very slightly differently it might have been one-all, in which case the papers would have been telling us how evenly matched it all was.
But if you assume it's going to be as one sided as the press, on modest evidence, thinks it is, what accounts for the disparity between the teams? Well, when we were getting beaten comprehensively in the 90s it always struck me that the difference was that the Aussies had the two best bowlers on either side, Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne, the latter one of the greatest cricketers ever to take the field. England now have one of the best swing bowlers in world cricket, Jimmy Anderson, and probably the best spin bowler, Graeme Swann. You would expect England to win. The batting on both sides looks quite fragile, although England look to have more players who can play a long innings, and we haven't yet seen a contribution from Cook and Pietersen.
A lot of the column inches devoted to Aussie bashing has focused on the popularity of the one-day and T20 formats Down Under. The thesis goes that those used to the short form of the game don't develop the mental strength and resilience required to bat all day, and that hit-and-giggle cricket doesn't foster the purity of technique required to survive at Test level against better bowling attacks. Certainly if you watch Shane Watson playing round his front pad (an LBW waiting to happen), you could be forgiven for sympathising with that view.
But I prefer the simple explanation of one Dirk Nannes, a former Australian T20 player, skier, businessman and saxophonist.
"Too much is read into it,that it's the demise of Australian cricket, that it's the end", writes Nannes in the Grauniad today.
"But the wheel will turn and the Poms will be crap again".
I'm afraid he's right.
