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Australia’s players have sullenly returned to home ports while a triumphant England will fly on to Melbourne on Wednesday to prepare themselves for the chance to win the Ashes in Perth from December 16.
Several changes to the home side are expected after the humiliation of an innings and 71-run defeat at Adelaide Oval, with Phil Hughes anointed by Ricky Ponting as the man to replace the injured Simon Katich at the top of the order.
The contrast with England could not be greater, as their captain Andrew Strauss noted the closeness and cohesion of their group was a key factor in the Adelaide success.
“We’ve been a very tight unit for the last couple of years now really and we’re seeing guys that are getting used to winning and used to celebrating others’ success and that’s a great thing,” he said.
“What I said is at the start of the series the only way we’ll win the Ashes is to have 11 guys performing, we can’t rely on one or two.
“We’re in a good position now because a lot of our batters are in good form, the bowlers are bowling well, but we need to make sure we don’t take our foot off the pedal because we know Australia are going to come back at us hard.”
Despite the obvious strength of his position, leading 1-0 against a team in a state of tremendous self-doubt, Strauss expected Australia to conjure a reply.
“It’s a five match series and what you do in the first two matches only counts for so much, the only time we can say that is if we’ve won the Ashes, which we won’t be doing for a while yet,” he said.
“I think what we’ve shown so far is that guys are in good form and we can play out in Australia which maybe there were some question marks about beforehand.”
Strauss also ruled out the possibility of using his side’s clear batting advantage to simply grind Australia out of the remainder of the series.
“Anyone who is thinking of us drawing the last three Test matches is well off the mark,” he said.
“Not many matches in Australia end up being drawn, and the basis of all our cricket out here so far has been to win games of cricket, and nothing will change.”
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