James Lawton: Botham the man to revive England's fighting qualities

What English cricket needs is hard professional leadership. It needs someone to take the flak rather than shuffle it towards another corner

Enough, already of the self-flagellation, Nasser. Of course, inserting the Aussies at the Gabba did rather expel you from the Erwin Rommel school of tactical thinkers, but then he did have the Afrika Corps. What you have is the demoralised residue of decades of ego-ridden waste and muddled thinking.

So you looked around at team-mates who have the culture of defeat in their bones, you saw they were gulping before Glenn McGrath or Shane Warne had sent down their first deliveries, and you flinched. It wasn't your finest moment but nor was it a catch-all for the reasons why England are as far away as ever from inflicting a flea bite on the tough professional hide of Australia.

Several Ashes series ago, before Steve Waugh took his team on to an entirely superior level of operation, but some time after the beating of England had become synonymous in the Australian mind with kicking a crippled dog, the tough No 3 batsman David Boon was asked to explain the ease with which he so regularly finished on the winning side. "Well, a little consistency helps, mate. Playing England over the years is like running into a cast of thousands," said Boon. "It seems to us that the Poms just don't know how to go about building a winning team. The key is knowing who your best players are and then putting a little trust in them."

It also helps if you don't saddle those best players with the obligation to perform in something as arcane and ultimately irrelevant as the County Championship. However many times it is remodelled, it is a home mostly for time-serving trundlers for whom simulating the demands of an average Australian state match is not so much a tough call as a journey into fantasy.

England's coach, Duncan Fletcher has, understandably enough, been quick to contradict his captain's assertion that one reason he asked one of the most formidable batting line-ups in the history of the game to go to the crease was that his own troops were pop-eyed with apprehension.

On this one, we have to take our choice, but looking at the traditionally flawless Gabba strip would not at the best of times have encouraged too much English optimism. With men like Matthew Hayden, Damien Martin and Adam Gilchrist in such god-like nick, it was surely the equivalent of being asked to shove your head into the mouth of a cannon. Hussain's call may have been generally disastrous but it did, according to the priorities of English cricket, have one huge benefit. It provided a clear-cut excuse behind which a multitude of frailties could hide. It also placed the captain of England squarely, and this was the best bit, in his classic role as ready-made scapegoat.

Apologists for an England who disintegrate at the first sight of a green cricket cap say that there has been some improvement since Hussain and Fletcher came together, and no doubt this is true – to a limited extent. There is a degree of Test match parity now with India, Pakistan and South Africa and if you look hard enough you might just pick out the beginnings of consistency in selection. But the heart of the team, when exposed to the highest levels of competition, remains alarmingly brittle. Against Australia, England do not lose. They are separated from their intestines. Ian Botham's verdict was as caustic and robust as ever. "They were like startled rabbits," he declared of his countrymen, and if anyone was entitled to say it it was surely the hero of Headingley.

What English cricket needs more than anything is hard professional leadership. It needs someone to stand up and take the flak rather than shuffle it towards another corner. The England captain will always be a target, of course; he goes on the field and shapes the action as much as he can and if he can be linked, as Hussain so clearly was in Brisbane, with a crucial tactical miscalculation, there is scarcely any limit on the critical retribution. It is at that point the vortex into which so many of Hussain's predecessors have been drawn begins to take hold.

England need somebody to do the job which Ray Illingworth, the Ashes-winning captain, defined when he was still young enough to do it properly. It is someone who picks the team, including the captain, and make all the important decisions off the field. It is someone who is big enough, respected enough, to say: "It is my judgement and I'll keep using it until you take away the job." Botham fancies his chances and such an appointment would surely represent a rallying point, especially when the now eviscerating challenge of Australia comes around.

Who is the spokesman and figurehead of English cricket in the current maelstrom Down Under? It is David Graveney, the chairman of selectors, a knowledgeable cricket man who organised the professional players' union and got himself into the great bureaucratic archipelago of the game. He never played Test cricket, which puts him, you would have thought, at some disadvantage when he rules over a committee formed by his captain, his coach and his fellow-selector, Geoff Miller, who did play Test cricket, including eight times against Australia. Committees do not bring leadership. They had one running the England football team before the arrival of Sir Alf Ramsey, with inevitably feeble results.

Committee talk certainly will not get England out of their current plight. It will take a new way of thinking, a new aggression and for that you need someone like Allan Border, who did such a superb job in helping to rebuild the Australian image of what a Test team should be. You go for a Border on the principle that if you can't beat them you had better get one of them to join you. Or you break the crumbling mould and take a flyer on "Beefy" Botham, who as a very young man once chased Ian Chappell out of a Melbourne bar.

Maybe Botham would have to do it from memory, but it appears that he still has one – and a vital one too. It is of a time when an England captain could never have admitted to looking into the eyes of his players and seeing fear.