Well, getting in my congratulations ahead of time - well done England. Your XI is a credit to your nation, as are the travelling fans, the Barmy Army.
At the start of the series I thought both pace attacks were roughly level in ability - boy was I wrong. The English pacemen have totally outbowled our men, a few sessions aside. I actually thought the difference between the two sides would be Swann, but his series has only been fair given he's in the top 2 spinners in world cricket at the moment.
The performance of the English quicks is ominous from my perspective, because they had players who would probably counted as journeymen come in after injury to a frontline player and then started bowling like all-world players. Tremlett for example. Bresnan also has performed exceptionally in the last two tests. The English clearly have a system now that enables any of there bowlers to bowl well in Australian conditions. There are not many batsmen in world cricket who could cope with some of the spells dished out by Anderson and Tremlett in this series.
As for our bowlers, we are a long way from Glenn McGrath and have fallen a long way compared to other attacks from other nations - effectively we now have 3 first change bowlers, without a genuine opening bowler among them. I'm watching Anderson swing it sideways, Dale Steyn doing similar but 15 km an hour quicker over in South Africa; even the Indians, a country not noted for their pace attack through history, have a better pace attack than us at the moment. The Barmy Army have it spot on with their assessment of Mitch Johnson.
Our batting has been pitiful, by and large - just way too injudicious in shot selection with only Hussey, and maybe Haddin matching up to the English players in that department. There is hope there though - we are not short of batsmen coming through the ranks in Shield cricket.
This series has been probably the worst series in Australia I can remember, probably since the Windies in 88/89 in terms of the Australian performance. At least back then we had some hope in the fact we were gradually overcoming some of the ructions (World Series Cricket, the rebel South African tour etc) that had affected our cricket in the previous decade or so - and it was clear we were building something with our squad then after coming off the amazing World Cup win in 1987.
This current lot certainly has some promise in the batting department, but our bowling is just awful right now. Also notable is the fact a lot of the players come from NSW - it's clear in this country if you are a youngster who comes from WA, SA or Victoria and have some athletic/sporting ability you'll find yourself heavily scouted by the various Australian Football League clubs to play Aussie Rules. That's a fact of life Australian cricket will have to get used to. The current test squad is certainly laden with NSWelshmen, without having an actual NSW selector from the national selection panel who has picked those players.
Anyway - England were/are too good. Cook will rightfully win man of the series and this team will go down as one of the most successful Ashes teams from England in history.
