Wednesday, July 25, 2001 Australia have been doing it to England for years. Every series they do it superbly, and every series England make the same old mistakes. If it goes on like this, England will never win the Ashes back. I'm talking, of course, about mind games.

The problem with losing again and again to the same side - apart from the fact that it's demoralising and tedious - is that every word the winners say becomes invested with a sort of mythological status. The rhetoric of losers sounds like hollow bluster: just look at Andy Caddick's me-against-the-world rant in the Independent on Sunday after the Lord's drubbing. But when winners start sounding off, people listen - as if every word is a nugget of Confucius-like wisdom. Steve Waugh, he say the moon is made of cheese, and suddenly we're all looking skyward and wondering ...

Waugh has become the past master of the loaded bon mot. Before the series started he casually remarked that Ian Ward looked like he was made of the right stuff. England pretended not to be listening, but Ward stayed in the team and Australia set about exposing a weakness outside off stump. The newcomer that Waugh didn't want in the England side was Owais Shah, so word mysteriously spread that Australia had worked him out during the one-day series. England panicked, and in came Usman Afzaal for the first Test instead. It was an un-Fletcher-like piece of selectorial dithering; Afzaal made 4 and 2, dropped a catch and fielded as if he had a limp.

But Waugh is more than the invisible selector round the England table. He sows doubts right up to the final moment. When Australia won the toss at Lord's, he had no hesitation putting England in. He didn't care that the pitch might deteriorate later. He was simply sending England a message: "We'll put you in, and we'll bowl you out." This tactic takes any gloss of England winning a toss themselves - which is unlikely anyway - because if they do and elect to bat first, Steve Waugh can claim he would have bowled first anyway. Either that, or I'm guilty of thinking the moon is made of cheese.

That's the trouble. We want to read more layers of intent in Waugh's every utterance because there's something faintly masochistic about an Ashes drubbing; part of us likes the idea that we're being beaten in the mind as well as on the pitch, because it gives us an extra excuse.

Well, England just have to stop pricking up their ears every time Waugh opens his mouth. How about a little psychological warfare of their own? We've heard nothing, for example, about the fact that Darren Gough has now dismissed Ricky Ponting three times out of three for scores of 11, 14 and 4. Nothing about the fact that Matthew Hayden could have started the series with two 0s, had he not been missed first ball at Edgbaston. Nothing about Brett Lee's waywardness (4 for 195 so far, at 4.43 an over). OK, so these are small victories. But when the other side has been feasting at your expense, even crumbs of comfort taste good.

Lawrence Booth is assistant editor of Wisden.com.

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