First, we all know that the International Cricket Council Future Tours programme puts immense pressure on all teams and that the Champions Trophy put a further squeeze on the time available for England’s preparation. However, there was time for more proper cricket before the first Test, but somebody decided not to use it for that purpose. It has happened before and England have got away with it, as they did in South Africa last time, when the opposition was even less prepared and their selectors failed to pick the best team, letting England get off to a winning start.

Selection has never been an exact science. Duncan Fletcher knows that for every inspired hunch there can be a horrendous howler. Picking men who have been out for months is a gamble, and James Anderson and Ashley Giles were up against it from the start. By Sydney, Anderson looked better in his opening spells, but his limbs, lacking bowling over months, seemed to tire easily. It is also all very well citing a need to bolster a fragile tail, but I would always want to play my better bowler, in this instance Monty Panesar over Giles.

This leads one quickly on to coaching and the need to teach the tail how to become more productive. Those who say that by the time a player reaches Test level he should be beyond coaching ignore changes in attitudes to player management and in what is expected from the bowlers with the bat. Shane Warne, who made the top score for Australia batting at No 8 the other day, has 34 Test ducks, third behind Courtney Walsh and Glenn McGrath. But over the years he has turned himself into an effective lower-order batsman.

Fletcher may be nearing the end of his natural time as coach. There are only so many things a coach or a captain can say to a team. Even if those things are still true, it might need somebody else to put them differently.

Fletcher has been largely lauded for his contribution all the way through to the glory of 2005 and former captains such as Nasser Hussain continue to speak highly of him. The only quality candidate in a small field is Tom Moody, but if he is to be persuaded to leave the Sri Lanka job, he is more likely to want to fill John Buchanan’s shoes with Australia. That would leave somebody like Peter Moores, who is in charge at the English academy. He is popular and respected, but not necessarily an improvement.

Selection is an issue, too, with the blurring of responsibility as soon as Fletcher apparently tried to distance himself from those early selections by implying that it was the captain who had got his way. The solution is to extend the duties of the chief selector and/or his colleagues by adding responsibility for on-tour selection to their brief. But that would make an already time-consuming and ill-rewarded post more demanding, implying that anybody involved would have to be a properly paid professional.

Would another captain have changed anything? Australia would have won the series if Andrew Strauss or a fit Michael Vaughan had been in charge. I still believe Strauss would have been the better choice, primarily because I liked the way he captained the side against Pakistan and it would have allowed Flintoff to concentrate on being Flintoff. Given how Strauss’s batting had thrived on the responsibility, it might also have helped him get more runs in Australia.

One thing a quicker-acting captain and coach might have sorted out earlier was Kevin Pietersen’s position in the batting order. It is all very well working in co-operation with one’s players and their preferences, but it is down to the management to tell Pietersen that they respect his preferences but must override them for the good of the team.

One reason given for making Flintoff captain was that he would get the best out of Steve Harmison. Well, apparently some things are beyond even multi-talented allrounders.

Harmison has been probably the biggest disappointment. Last week he admitted, far too candidly, that he had little idea why things had gone wrong in the early Tests, that he was looking forward to getting home and that he had no idea what his programme would be in the four months leading up to what could be his next Test in May, because Fletcher had not yet told him what he should be doing. Add to that his earlier admission that he had been “nervous” at Brisbane and one wonders why England have a psychologist on the staff who apparently did not spot a prime candidate for his services.

Now the prime concern for those who run this team is that they slip no further when they get back to Test cricket next summer. As in the 1980s, when the players involved in the “blackwash” series against West Indies mostly went on to resume successful careers, we must persevere with the talent, and genuine talent it is too, that we have. The challenge is to work with it and to add more steel.