After all the wretched soul-searching, and the desperate picking of names out of hats by David Graveney in the past week (David Fulton, Ben Hollioake, Andrew Flintoff), the selectors made only two changes to the squad for the fourth Ashes Test at Headingley, which starts on Thursday. It was adieu Ian Ward and au revoir Craig White, despite his century for Yorkshire in the Roses match. And hello again to Nasser Hussain and Alan Mullally. Mullally's selection is in part a victory for Aussie psychology - he took five wickets against them for Hampshire in the game where they played four front-line batsmen and lost. He has also been talked up enthusiastically by both himself and by Shane Warne, his ex-Hampshire team-mate. Though as Warne has also talked up Dimitri Mascarenhas in the past, you can't take him entirely seriously. Mullally will probably play ahead of Richard Johnson, because his left-armers do at least add some variety to the all-seam attack which England are likely to plump for on a traditional Headingley track. He last played in the Test series in South Africa 19 months ago. The second psychological victory for the Aussies comes in the non-selection of Owais Shah. The green and gold whispers that they sorted him out during the one-day series still echo loudly in the selector's ears, but surely it would have been worth trying him at Headingley. There can be no better place to learn than against one of the greatest teams of all time. But that favoured selectorial mantra – you can teach an old dog new tricks - leaves Ramprakash in the middle of the middle order, at least until The Oval when Graham Thorpe and/or Michael Vaughan should have recovered from injury. Robert Croft keeps his place, despite contributing the grand total of three overs and three runs at Trent Bridge. This must have something to do with Nasser Hussain who has at last escaped from the finger clinic after two Tests on the sidelines - Hussain got the best out of Croft during the winter. But Hussain returns to a very different England side than the one he led, relatively optimistically, into Edgbaston little over a month ago. It is a side beaten in every aspect of the game, a side that has been unceremoniously spat out by the Australian fighting machine, which has lost the Ashes with three full days and two Tests to spare, and which seems to be fast losing the art of fighting back which Hussain had so painstakingly built up.

This team owe it to him to fish out something special at Headingley, the first of two back-to-back Tests. Losing 5-0 to these Australians wouldn't be the worst humiliation in English cricket history. But to lose 5-0 without showing more of the fire of Thursday evening at Trent Bridge, would put England right back in the mire which Hussain rescued them from in 1999. No one is asking for Botham's heroics, just a little self-respect.

England squad: 1 Marcus Trescothick, 2 Michael Atherton, 3 Mark Butcher, 4 Nasser Hussain (captain), 5 Mark Ramprakash, 6 Usman Afzaal, 7 Alec Stewart (wicketkeeper), 8 Alex Tudor, 9 Andrew Caddick, 10 Darren Gough, 11 Alan Mullally, Robert Croft, Richard Johnson.

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