CRICKET:It was a small thing but it said a lot about the way England gave up the Ashes over the course of three Tests. It was Kevin Pietersen's infuriating habit, when batting with the tail-enders, of taking a single off the first ball of an over. In Perth he did it five times in the first innings and four times in the second. For over after over the best batsman in the team was exposing the rabbits to the hunters' guns. It was the sort of behaviour that made no sense.

Just before lunch yesterday, with England on the brink of oblivion at 346 for eight and Steve Harmison recently arrived at the crease, Pietersen took a single from the first ball of a Shane Warne over. The second ball - surprise, surprise - trapped Harmison leg-before and England were nine down. With the first ball after lunch, once more from Warne, and with Monty Panesar at the other end, Pietersen did it again. This time, when the very next ball hit Panesar's stumps, it provided the signal to hand back the Ashes.

Pietersen is not a selfish player, he possesses an excellent cricket brain and he is the most prominent among a handful of England players whose reputations have been enhanced by this tour. But what he was doing ran counter to the most basic form of cricketing common sense, exemplifying the lack of managerial rigour that lay at the heart of the surrender of the Ashes.

What we learnt from the overall failure was that the summer of 2005, for all its euphoria, was not emblematic of a fundamental change in English cricket. Eight years ago Steve Waugh took a look at another England side newly arrived in Australia and decided they were there for the taking. His thoughts, recorded in his autobiography, are worth revisiting.

"To me," he wrote, "this England team lacked the match-awareness and the self-belief that would allow them to lift in the big moments that present themselves in a match or a series. They were trotting out such well-worn lines as 'It's only a matter of time, lads' and 'Keep working, the chances will come'. Both were true, but hardly energising or inspirational. We eagerly sought such opportunities."

Waugh's analysis could have been applied with equal accuracy to Andrew Flintoff's team, while his own philosophy could be seen in the attitude of Ricky Ponting.

Like Waugh, Ponting believes in seizing opportunities, from the very biggest down to the most insignificant. You could see as much yesterday when he ran out Geraint Jones, picking up and hitting the wicket from silly point in a blur of indivisible thought and movement. What an example he set, and not just with his runs.

Ponting is the most typically Australian of Australian cricketers, with a long memory, a smile that hides more than it reveals, a belief that the game should be played on the front foot and a determination to let absolutely no opening go begging.

The great indictment of Flintoff and Duncan Fletcher is that England created a few opportunities but frittered them away through a lack of self-confidence.

Too often they left the aggression to their opponents. And how the Aussies loved that. Fletcher, who spent six years turning England from no-hopers into Ashes winners, could count himself desperately unlucky to lose the pro-active intelligence and calming influence of Michael Vaughan. Without Ponting's consuming desire to exact revenge, Australia might not have been so formidable over the past four weeks.

The decision to appoint Flintoff in his place was a poor one. With three matters pressing on his mind - his batting, his bowling and his ankle - Flintoff could hardly be expected to give the demands of the captaincy the attention they required. When it came to matching Ponting's ability to marshal his forces, he had no answers.

England will have to give some serious thought to what happens next. Fletcher and Flintoff will try to use the last two Tests to put a gloss of respectability on the tour and the composition of the team in those matches will indicate whether the coach is committed to change or to more of the same. Thereafter the captaincy must be reconsidered. If Vaughan is not available, Andrew Strauss is the next man in line.

So poorly have England performed in one-day competitions no one expects them to do much better in the World Cup next year. But if Fletcher has taken the lessons of this disaster to heart, he will have noted the Australian revival began with a series of supposedly meaningless contests - the five-day and one-day matches against a World XI shortly after their return from losing the Ashes. If he is to regain the respect and trust of those who celebrated with him in 2005, he must seize the earliest opportunity to show England, too, are capable of using the memory of failure to generate new success.