Australia would have regained the Ashes even if England had played up to their 2005 standards. Anyone who has ever seen a western knows that when a group of old compadres get together for one last, vital mission, it cannot end in failure. And these compadres were way too good, way too committed. Even the most embittered England supporter should take pleasure in the fact that they have seen Ricky Ponting and Adam Gilchrist bat and, above all, seen Shane Warne bowl.

England’s one chance was essentially negative: that the intensity of the schedule would favour the younger team. But though England were younger, they weren’t fitter. The fact of losing was no disgrace: it is 36 years since England last won an away series against a full-strength Australia side. The manner of it was disgraceful.

England were at once worn out but underprepared; complacent yet overapprehensive; inward-looking yet dysfunctional as a unit; closeted yet distracted.

The captaincy was not especially significant. Doubtless Michael Vaughan would have done the job better than Andrew Flintoff. So might Andrew Strauss. Indeed, any one of us who sensed that England should have batted on into the third morning in Adelaide would have averted the whitewash.

When the Flintoff v Strauss conundrum first arose last summer, it seemed to have the makings of one of those great English captaincy arguments which always pit a public school/university chap from the Home Counties against a working-class northerner: Sheppard v Hutton; Cowdrey v Close; Cowdrey v Illingworth; Brearley v Boycott. Yet the debate never really took wing (the public got more passionate about the wicketkeeping, and later the spin bowling).

My own feeling is that if your best player really, really wants the captaincy, there has to be an excellent reason to deny him — which there wasn’t. And simply, the captaincy makes less difference these days. Everywhere now (perhaps less in Australia than elsewhere), the power rests with the coach, and England’s coach had become very powerful indeed.

Duncan Fletcher took over the job in 1999, in a climate of despair after a World Cup performance that was not so much disastrous as farcical. A sympathetic ECB chairman, Lord Mac-Laurin, ensured that he had resources — central contracts, specialist assistance, luxury travel — that his predecessors could only fantasise about.

Above all, he had authority: on tour, it became unbridled to an extent previously matched only, very briefly, by Ray Illingworth; at home, Fletcher saw off a rival as intimidating as Rod Marsh, who found his views on wicketkeeping disregarded; even the chairman of selectors, David Graveney, was kept at arm’s length. And Fletcher also made certain the contracted players played as little cricket as possible whether under his direct control or not — traditional warm-up and practice matches, difficult enough given the current schedule, were disdained.

Against this background, Fletcher was able to create a hermetically sealed world in which he believed his players could thrive. This was the “England bubble”. And the players did thrive. The first five years of this millennium represented English cricket’s most sustained period of success since the 1950s. England played some vibrant, thrilling cricket. Fletcher’s professionalism, his seeming omniscience and his sense of certainty played a major role in making this happen. It all culminated in the summer of 2005.

But there are problems living inside a bubble: eventually the oxygen runs out. And if this one began as the Eden Project, it had turned by this winter into something like the Big Brother house. Accurate information rarely seeped out; it also stopped seeping in.

In the nature of things, players came and went from the bubble, but Fletcher was ever-present, and in the rare downtime allowed by this demanding job, he disappeared to his home in Cape Town. He isn’t a man given to cocktail party chitchat either (to put it mildly). So he lost touch. Even experts have to keep listening and learning; Fletcher, on the evidence of the 2006-07 Ashes, just stopped. Indeed, one senior county coach, a man who should be in constant touch with the England management, told me recently that Fletcher had not spoken to him in more than two years.

England supporters at the Adelaide Test talked nonstop even to strangers about the team selection. The chairman of selectors was there on a private visit, yet Graveney was not party to the decisions. If one enquired about this, there was some piffle about “protocol”, as though this were the Japanese imperial palace rather than a cricket tour.

The team was evidently picked by Fletcher and his tyro captain. There may have been some input from the “tour committee” (Strauss, Paul Collingwood and Geraint Jones), though it is hard to imagine what: “Who do you think should keep wicket, Geraint?” Afterwards, Fletcher hinted that the decision to play James Anderson and Ashley Giles and not Monty Panesar had been based on the evidence of a practice match, the sort of game he had spent his reign demolishing and decrying, and that he had wanted Panesar to play, anyway. “I am not the only selector,” he said, which was a cowardly comment.

To survive in sports team management long term, flexibility is paramount. The trick is to sense developing flaws and take action, well before they become obvious to the outside world. Instead, Fletcher foolishly failed to consider the consequences of Giles’s long-term injury or to grasp that Panesar was the one weapon he had with even the possibility of surprising the Australians.

Instead, he initially spurned him, then allowed (or encouraged) Flintoff to set defensive fields when Panesar did play, sending a message to the enemy that he was no threat — the very reverse of the psychology Warne had applied so effectively against all-comers over the past 14 years.

It is time for renewal, and there can be no renewal without change at the top. Whatever happens in the World Cup, England must have a new coach.