They always give a toss, we tourists just throw it away

Diary from Down Under

Nasser Hussain believes that England's players have much to learn from the Australians but although the two teams stayed in neighbouring hotels when they were in Perth, they exchanged not a word.

The England management's vigorous non-fraternisation policy until the end of the series means that direct questions about technique and discipline are not allowed.

Even if you had not been to a day's cricket you could have picked the winners just by seeing them in their hotel. Justin Langer came over at breakfast to talk about his new book and to comment on the failure of the England batsmen on the first day. You can score a lot of runs at the Waca, he said, but only if you play precisely. No daft pulling or hooking. There's the lesson, but Hussain and Alec Stewart, who ignored the advice, will not be back to apply the lesson. Michael Vaughan will.

Glenn McGrath was relaxed enough last Sunday night to join a sing-song begun and conducted by David "Bumble" Lloyd with such commitment that the hotel management moved his pick-up choir out of the atrium bar into a less public place. But you could hardly blame them. It was 2am.

The England party had a couple of drinks together in their hotel bar early on Tuesday evening. It was no surprise to see them subdued; there was no animation among a group of fit young athletes. The players talked quietly among themselves or on their mobile phones before separating. They do not like the public gaze.

They are not anti-social. They are as charming and polite as their nature dictates, but they do not always give that impression. The England and Wales Cricket Board have taken money to allow a tour company to sell their package with the promise that clients will stay in the team hotel. The travelling fans are known to cricket writers as "winkies" – they wink at you – and what the players cannot stand is getting in the lift and being asked why they played such a stupid shot. They resent the winkies and the poor winkies do not understand why.

The word in Nasser's ear

The work rate of Nasser Hussain and Duncan Fletcher is exemplary. When other players are having a kip they are obsessively studying videos prepared and edited by their analyst, Malcolm Ashton.

Some TV commentators have been talking up the theory that Hussain is a dictator. They hear the unedited chat from the stump microphones and Hussain appears to be telling his bowlers where and what to bowl. I suspect he is reminding them of the lessons in Ashton's films. Hussain's problem is not obsessive over-preparation or a Hitlerian tendency. It is that England's bowlers have not been capable of pitching the ball where they know they should.

Hussain's tragedy was to believe those stats he wanted to believe and ignore any contrary indicators. He learned that in six of the last seven Tests in Brisbane the captain winning the toss had put the opposition in to bat. But he did not hear when he was told that the team batting first had scored more than 300 on the first day in six of the last seven Gabba Tests.

Hussain may have hoped to surprise the Aussies, but he succeeded only in appalling England's followers, who had hoped that he would win the toss and unleash Vaughan and Marcus Trescothick. Defeat in four days after collapsing for 79 evaporated what self-belief the team had carried with them.

It took two more Tests for us to understand that the principal reason why it had taken Australia the full four days to win in Brisbane rather than three or three and a half was that England had asked them to bat first.

Gift of the Gabba

Some light relief. You can get to and from the Gabba on a small, neat Brisbane River ferry. One evening, when I had one to myself – the Independent On Sunday boat – I said to the boatman that it was nice to discover that Brisbane in Queensland had something in common with Venice in Italy. "What's that, mate?" he asked.

An England win at last

Australian newspapers were remarkably hostile towards the England team at the start of the series. Trevor Marshalsea in the Sydney Morning Herald wrote a piece headlined "God save the Queen... because nothing will save the English cricket team".

Mike Coward wrote in The Australian: "Surely no England team in history had a worse first day of an Ashes series." The message was that the series was a rout before it had begun. The day on which these pieces appeared was England's best of the series.

The series may be gone now – though it might not have been had England batted for another hour in Adelaide before the rain – but the criticism was premature, surely.

You wanted to know why the Aussie journalists feel so strongly. It seems they feel intimidated by the weight of English cricket writers who crowd into press boxes that cannot absorb them all. The Brits outnumber the Aussies by four or five to one.

But there must be more to it. Coward argues that the real motive lies deep in Australian history with the sustained anger of the convicts who were transported to New South Wales and Victoria.

After travelling this hot, colourful continent and being included in the flow of entertaining and intelligent conversation, after seeing fine paintings in good galleries, staying in comfortable hotels and eating in excellent restaurants you begin to think that the descendants of these convicts do not have it so bad. Indeed, you wonder if many of the petty thieves of England and Ireland weren't bloody lucky to be sent out here.

The English cricket writers had much to be sorrowful about and there was no shortage of good Australian wine in which to drown it. (If Derek Pringle, formerly of this parish, had the wine list, make that very good wine.) But the media have been the only English winners on the tour so far. They beat the Australian media, at football rather than cricket, with our own Angus Fraser scoring the winner. Bumble had to come off with a strained hamstring and he should really have led the singing from a seated position.

Body of evidence

Since Bodyline is still a dirty word 70 years after the event, when the Australian Broadcasting Corporation scheduled a commemorative programme last month, I feared the worst. But I learned that many of Harold Larwood's deliveries that hit Australian batsmen were on the off, not the leg-side, and was moved near to tears by film of Larwood and Bill Voce getting a standing ovation when they returned to the Melbourne Cricket Ground after the war. Douglas Jardine was and remains the villain.

Bodyline was one of three programmes made by the ABC in Adelaide. Two about cricket in the Seventies allowed Lillee and Thomson some fun at the expense of the Poms, but history enables you to appreciate the contemporary game. (How good are this Australian side compared to Clive Lloyd's West Indians? Discuss.) What a pity the BBC or C4 don't do the same for English cricket. The least they can do is let us all watch the Australian programmes.