Tuesday, August 14, 2001 Sorry to brag, but how sweet it is to be an Australian when we are so fabulous and the English so feeble. Their national team are an embarrassment, their domestic structure a shambles, their selectors fools, the Ashes lost again. At least they talked a good fight this time; on the field they were as unpardonably dire as ever. "There is so little hope of revival," suggests that astute judge Peter Roebuck. "They simply have not learned from their experiences, and their cricketing judgment is immature. Maybe this is because they are brought up to play unthinkingly, whereas [their opponents] are brought up to play as well as they can … They were incredibly incompetent in the field, conceding overthrows, bowling wides and no-balls, dropping catches. They played like a badly coached schoolboy rugby team." Quite so. Except that the team Roebuck was writing about is Australia - 14 years ago - when he was still English and when English cricketers still knew how to swagger. Two years later Australia regained the Ashes 4-0. They have not gone within cooee of giving them up since. So here's a rash prediction: England will win back the Ashes in 2005. Steve Waugh's side are directly comparable to two other steamrolling Australian Ashes parties: Warwick Armstrong's 1921 side, who won 3-0, and Don Bradman's 1948 Invincibles, who won 4-0. Both those teams repeated the annihilation, both by a 4-1 winning margin, in the return bout two years later. Both then lost the Ashes next time round in England - both going down 1-0 in attritional, rain-ruined contests. Eerie, hey? It doesn't end there. The 1921 and 1948 squads – average age 32 and 30 respectively - were unusually wrinkly. Steve Waugh's men, another thirty-something brigade, are the oldest since Bradman's. It is entirely logical, then, that the 2005 Australians - like the failed 1926 and 1953 squads - will be a grab-bag of the green and the not-so-golden oldies. Of the current side, six youngsters - Gilchrist, Gillespie, Martyn, Ponting, Katich and Lee – plus two veterans, McGrath and Warne or Slater, are likely to return in 2005. That leaves nine first-timers - one fewer than 1997, true - but back then the new generation included McGrath, Gillespie, Gilchrist, Ponting. Hard to see that gang of four being replicated so soon. Worst Australian Side Ever? The Fleet Street drama dealers must be drooling over their laptops already. Two wild cards stand in the way of England: the first one is England. Vaughan, Trescothick and Tudor aside, their cupboard also looks bare. All the selectors have to do, in theory, is pick the best youngsters, back them through thick and thin, and the cycle should spin England's way. But if Graveney and his predecessors had done that a decade ago they wouldn't be in half the pickle they're in now. Who knows if they've learned the lesson? And then there's Steve Waugh. Unlike Armstrong and Bradman, for whom the 1921 and 1948 tours were triumphant farewells, Waugh will almost definitely be around in two years. His legacy, his aura, will still inspire the Australians in four years. He might even fancy one last crack at the Poms himself – he'll turn 40 in 2005, as Bradman did in 1948. But these days, unshakeable as his batting remains, he tends to make a hundred or nothing much, suggesting that his eye has faded fractionally and that, when the decline comes, it will come quickly. For now, though, the Australians are a sensational team who will slaughter England - by 4-1, of course - in 2002-03. "They are not just very good," John Woodcock wrote last week, "they are horribly, brutally, insufferably, supremely good." What chance that in 2005 he will be saying the same thing about Michael Vaughan's England?

Chris Ryan is managing editor of Wisden Cricket Monthly

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