England Test captain Andrew Strauss (center) jumps in the air with his team as it celebrates winning the Ashes Test series after beating Australia in the fifth Test at the Sydney Cricket Ground on Friday. Tim Wimborne / Reuters

BEIJING - So much for a bright new dawn for Australian cricket arriving this week at the Sydney Cricket Ground.

Instead, a slightly changed Australian Test team under a new captain suffered its third innings defeat in this series. It's the first time that has happened to Australia in a long and proud cricket history. It has been a right royal flogging.

England is nowhere near as good as the West Indies of the 1980s and Australia never lost to them as badly as this lot has this summer.

England deserves its emphatic 3-1 series victory. The tourists have been far superior and deserve high praise. They got all the basics right while Australia got them wrong.

England has a good pace attack, with talented bowlers in the wings. England needs another classy spinner to support Graeme Swann and a strong replacement for Paul Collingwood in the batting if it is to beat India and South Africa to climb to No 1 in the world. But England is on the right track.

Like all marauding invaders, the Englishmen are leaving chaos behind them.

The omens for Australia were poor before the series started but captain Ricky Ponting and the selectors stuck by most of their trusted players - and suffered the consequences.

Australia does not have enough good untried players to have defeated this England team, but it's true that in the four years since Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath retired, Australia has gone backwards.

You'd think that in four years Australia would have made some progress. That time has been all but wasted and this summer the Test side has finally fallen apart.

Still, a few faint signs of hope shone through the Sydney gloom.

First, Australia had a new captain who, before a ball had been bowled, began changing things. Michael Clarke reintroduced a custom begun by Ponting's predecessors of inviting a former Test player to present a debutant with his new baggy green cap. Ponting had taken over that duty himself.

Was he reminding everyone that he was the boss, and that his team did not need any help, encouragement or recognition from has-beens from a distant past?

Quite a few commentators in Australia saw it that way.

Ponting's leadership never matched his ambition. The cap business smacked of ego and Clarke was quick to change it.

This was very much Ponting's team and he has always been too quick to defend it and too sensitive to criticism. Now he has to take a large share of the responsibility. Surely his days as Australian captain are finished.

Great batsmen don't always make great captains - Brian Lara and Sachin Tendulkar both tried it, struggled and gave it up. Ponting should stand aside and bat down the list - or retire.

He has been a poor tactician, and his unimaginative leadership on the field cost Australia two Ashes series in England, in 2005 and 2009.

Those series were close contests. In both, Ponting's pedestrian captaincy allowed England to fight back from dire situations.

Clarke has a decent tactical brain and a good feel for the game. So does Brad Haddin. But Clarke needs to make runs to convince most people he can remain a Test player let alone be a captain.

Chairman of selectors Andrew Hilditch and his fellow selectors should also stand down. Apart from persevering with Shane Watson, Hilditch has reigned over a muddled selection era, the end result of which is this huge loss to England. Mark Waugh, a good lateral thinker with a sharp tactical brain, should be one of the new selectors.

Who else? Ian Healy, Shane Warne and Mark Taylor are all too busy with TV work. Former Test fast bowler, NSW captain and Pakistan coach Geoff Lawson is a fine judge but he's a passionate man who speaks his mind. There's no room for that sort in Australian cricket these days.

The Australian game is now run by a bloated bureaucracy and all such organizations thrive on mediocrity.

Australian cricket needs better leaders at all levels - the sooner the better.

China Daily

(China Daily 01/08/2011 page15)