The England cricket tour is in crisis as the team suffered a collective mental breakdown in the second Test against Australia at the Adelaide Oval on Tuesday. After contriving to lose a match from a position of near total dominance, England are two down in the five-Test series.

Australia are utterly rampant, every bit of their habitual swagger and condescension is back. England lost by six wickets, but it is the manner of the defeat, rather than the margin, that is so peculiarly distressing.

England play Australia again in Perth next week and must somehow rescue themselves from the morass of defeatism and self-doubt that such an extraordinary result must cause. They have a captain whose leadership is under question and whose ankle injury has flared up again, a strike bowler who can’t strike, a back-up seamer who is cannon fodder and a spinner who commands no respect, along with a batting line-up that played itself into trouble by panicking in the face of good bowling.

Add to this a coach, Duncan Fletcher, whose policy has been to talk aggressive and select defensive, and you have a team who don’t know who they are supposed to be and a captain who doesn’t know whether to stick or twist.

It was a marshmallow-hearted performance from the batsmen, who failed spectacularly and en masse. It seemed impossible that any team could be in any kind of trouble - still less lose a match - after declaring the first innings closed on 551 for six. Perhaps they should have batted on. No England team had lost a Test match after such a towering first-innings performance. England have, once again, set a benchmark for ineptitude.

Andrew Flintoff, the captain, naturally put as brave a face on things as possible and held to the line that England played well for four days and lost because of one bad hour, an hour in which Shane Warne and Brett Lee bowled very well. This is fair enough as far it goes, but I trust that, in private, England are looking to a more profound interpretation of events.

Because it wasn’t just that Australia were very good. England played into their hands. Perhaps they should acquire a copy of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, read the cover and abide by its instructions. Don’t Panic! But panic England did and if they deny this, they will lay themselves open to further panicking in Perth.

For superior bowling does not make you play stupid shots, not unless you panic. It started to go wrong for England when Andrew Strauss got a bad decision as England had been going serenely till then. But Paul Collingwood and Ian Bell put together a ghastly run-out, Bell rooted to the spot as if cursed by Harry Potter and Collingwood charging through screaming as if his trousers were on fire.

Kevin Pietersen was out playing his stockwhip-sweep at Warne before playing himself in and Flintoff went wafting at a wide one with feet cemented to the earth. The last of the so-called batsmen, Geraint Jones, gave a catch off a ball that might have been called a wide had he left it alone. All these shots were played, let us remember, in circumstances in which cautious, risk-free advance was the obvious tactic.

This was not an error of tactics, it was losing your head. That is the point that England must confront in the week ahead, before they get back down to business in Perth. They cannot hide behind the excellence of the Australia bowlers and must contemplate their own collective and individual failing of nerve.

Ian Botham called the ageing Australian team “Dad’s Army”, but it was England who played the part to the full yesterday. It was a team full of Corporal Joneses: “Don’t panic! Don’t panic, Mr Mainwaring!”

And so England panicked. It is unusual, to the point of uniqueness, for a team to lose from England’s position of dominance, but it will require something still more remarkable if they are to get anything from this series. It looks as if the Ashes are gone.