Australia will be upset at going out of the World Twenty20. That was clear from Ricky Ponting’s comments. We were taking the competition seriously — of course we were. It is a major tournament and Twenty20 is the future of the game.

As with England, our players are at a disadvantage because few of them have experience of 20-overs cricket. But no excuses. Our guys will know they didn’t play well. The trouble is that a game or two every six months does not carry you very far in picking up the skills. While the best players should be able to adapt, I know from my experience with Rajasthan Royals that it takes a few contests to learn to feel situations and get into Twenty20 momentum.

Losing to Sri Lanka is no disgrace because they have some genuine world-class players, and when Chris Gayle gets going for any length of time, as he did on Saturday, you’ll be playing catch-up. It was a tough group, but South Africa and India may be strongest overall.

Although Australia will still be hurting, this could be a blessing in disguise for the Ashes. They will be able to have a short break to get this out of their systems and then tick along with their practice out of the spotlight before the warm-ups. They have one focus now, no distractions before July 8 in Cardiff.

I’ve been pleased to see the influence of spin in the competition and thought that Australia should have gone with Nathan Hauritz against West Indies. A lot of the teams are using two specialist spinners, even England, and it was Ajantha Mendis who started to peg back Australia on Monday. Our guys are just not playing spin too well at the moment. I am sure the England selectors will have noticed.

The most obvious point is that spinners make batsmen put their own pace on the ball, but that is only part of the value. I find it quite funny to hear of fast and medium-fast bowlers working on variety, mixing up their pace and lengths and so on. That’s great, but isn’t it what spin bowlers have been doing since the game began, with disguise, angles, flight, degrees of turn and so on?

I raised a few eyebrows in my column before the IPL last year by predicting that bowlers would be key to success. Twenty20 was supposedly designed to be a batsman’s game, with balls flying to all parts. But one of the most basic principles holds true, that the best way to contain a side is to take wickets.

I don’t have any stats to back this up, but I bet there aren’t many teams who recover from losing three wickets in the first six overs. That is a good target for the bowling side. Take the England-Pakistan game: Pakistan were three down early, so Shoaib Malik and Younus Khan couldn’t play the big shots and the run-rate soon escalated out of control. Yes, you can get back into the game from there, but it takes a big hitter — like Yusuf Pathan, Yuvraj Singh, Dimitri Mascarenhas or Andrew Symonds — to fire in the late stages. In a way, you could say that theory has been turned on its head again. A lot of emphasis is placed on the end of the innings, but those first few overs shape the way the game pans out in the first place.

The situation with Symonds is very sad. It seems that playing for Australia is not as important to him as it once was. He has let himself and everyone else down, but I hope this is not the end for him because he is such a talent. All being well, he will rediscover the drive and commitment he needs.

Captain’s log is a bad read for Paul Collingwood

Captaincy is a big thing in Twenty20. You have to try to be an over ahead of play.

Yes, you need to be flexible, but once you get behind in your thinking, you never really catch up. You end up putting fielders where the ball has just been hit — that is usually a sign of a batsman being in control. As a captain, you want to make him think and hit balls where you want him to hit them.

Tactically, I haven’t been too impressed with Paul Collingwood. He has a few qualities — he’s a fighter and a guy you would want to have in your team, but I don’t see him as a captain. You need to get funky at times, to throw caution to the wind and show a bit of flair and imagination. I just don’t think that Collingwood has that. His fielding positions always seem pretty basic to me.

The decision to leave out Dimitri Mascarenhas for the Netherlands game was just wrong. Collingwood thinks he can do the same job himself, but he is nowhere near as good in the finishing role. It was interesting to hear one of the Dutch guys saying that they got a lift when they saw that Dimi’s name wasn’t on the teamsheet.

At least England got it right against Pakistan and I hope, for their sake, that they’ve learnt the lesson. To be fair, I would give Collingwood a little tick for opening the bowling with Dimi.

He may have taken Pakistan a little bit by surprise there, which doesn’t mean it is necessarily the way to go from now on.

The key word here is flexibility. Look at conditions, look at your opponents and don’t feel you have to open the bowling with stock, standard pace every time.