Cricket/Ashes Series: This is no time to be beating about the bush, so straight to the point. The Australian team that has dominated the game for a decade and more, transforming the manner in which Test cricket is played, is coming apart at the seams as age, injury and the self-doubt created by the compelling performance of the England team and the unthinkable prospect of giving up the Ashes to the poms take their toll.

Beaten in the second Test and within a whisker of losing the third, Ricky Ponting, Australia's beleaguered captain, faces the possibility of going into what promises to be one of the most intense of all Ashes Tests without Glenn McGrath and Jason Gillespie. The travails of Gillespie this summer have been well documented - a once brilliant figure reduced to forlorn cannon fodder.

McGrath's problems are physical, for without having recovered completely from the ankle injury that kept him out of the Edgbaston match and hindered him at Old Trafford, he has now sustained trouble in his right elbow that would affect his bowling and fielding.

If he plays, it will be a patched-up version of a once sleek fighting machine, with the chance he may not complete the course. Should both be confined to the sidelines, it will be one of the rare occasions in the nine years since Gillespie joined McGrath on his debut against West Indies at Sydney in November 1996 that neither will have taken the field. The extent of this calamity should not be underestimated nor lost in the smokescreen as the damage to the team is played down.

In their prime, they formed one of the giant new-ball pairings, behind only Waqar Younis and Wasim Akram, who shared 497 wickets opening the bowling for Pakistan, and West Indies' Courtney Walsh and Curtly Ambrose, who managed 421. In 45 matches as an opening pair, McGrath and Gillespie have shared 382 wickets, with 13 additional matches where one did not get the new ball.

Already, Shaun Tait had been drafted in to replace Gillespie and make his Test debut and should McGrath pull out Michael Kasprowicz will be added to the side. That would leave Ponting relying almost totally on Shane Warne to give him control from one end, with Kasprowicz worthy but lacking spark this summer and Tait extremely rapid but, if not quite the scattergun he has been painted, then hardly a like-for-like replacement for McGrath or Gillespie.

Tait could play a blinder but the potential is also there for him to disappear to the boundary and beyond. It is worth recording that with McGrath missing at Edgbaston, England racked up in excess of 400 runs on the first day against Brett Lee, Gillespie, Kasprowicz and Warne.

Cheering as all this might be for Michael Vaughan and his side, they will still need to work hard. There is something unnerving about the knowledge that preparations, necessary as they might be, are under way for an open-top bus ride through London. It invites disaster and for all the dominance England showed in the last two matches there is not much between the teams.

In a manner of speaking, Australia have the upper hand, for a win here will allow them to keep the Ashes for another two years, as will draws here and at The Oval. Even a defeat here can be rectified with a win in the last Test. England have to win one match and not lose the other.

England can draw no sustenance from their Ashes record at Trent Bridge, which shows three wins in 19 matches. The last two games here have resulted in Australian wins, the retention of the Ashes and the unedifying sight of Warne, who has taken 21 wickets on this ground in three matches, wiggling his celebrations on the dressing-room balcony.

England will need to put Australia under pressure with the bat on a pitch that has not yielded an Ashes century since that scored by Graham Thorpe on his debut 12 years ago. The bounce can be extravagant in a loopy, tennis-ball way, the matted grass can encourage sideways movement and the new Fox Road stand, so they say, exacerbates swing.

Then they will need to respond with the ball. Local wisdom suggests this might be the match where Matthew Hoggard's conventional away swing comes into its own. But if the pitch is as hard as the groundsman suggests and the ball still scuffs, there is no reason to suppose the reverse swing employed so successfully by Andrew Flintoff and Simon Jones, or Steve Harmison's bounce, cannot come into play.

ENGLAND: Trescothick, Strauss, Vaughan (capt), Bell, Pietersen, Flintoff, G Jones, Giles, Harmison, S Jones, Hoggard.

AUSTRALIA: Hayden, Langer, Ponting (capt), Martyn, Clarke, Kattich, Gilchrist, Warne, Lee, McGrath, Tait.