There's more than one way to skin an England team, as Brett Lee amply demonstrated at the end of both the second and third days at Perth. But Australia are a team who are eagerly pursuing perfection, and today, nothing but the cleanest of kills would do. Steve Waugh could easily have turned back to his salivating serial killer and massacred England in a flurry of bouncers and boundaries, but that is not his style. Instead, he returned to Glenn McGrath and Jason Gillespie – pest-controllers par excellence – who flushed out England's nest of terrified fieldmice. In the first half-hour, England lost three wickets for one run – itself the prelude to a ludicrous run-out – and Nasser Hussain was even dropped first ball. Why use the hatchet when the eiderdown will do?

Richard Dawson, the nightwatchman, was quickly undone by bounce than was more Paignton than Perth, but his promotion had at least left England with a semblance of a balanced line-up. Alec Stewart at No. 7 and Craig White at 8 is how the card should have looked way back at Brisbane, and for a time, while Robert Key and Nasser Hussain were making a fist of a fightback, England must have harboured hopes of setting a perfunctory target. But Michael Vaughan and Mark Butcher, and their private game of "it", had already sealed their fate.

Key was phlegmatic once again, and along with Dawson and Steve Harmison, he proved that England's Ashes campaign hasn't been completely without hope for the future. And Hussain – at least until his dismissal – managed to tame the simmering fury that had caused his macho-man dismissal in the first innings. This time, he mixed the right blend of aggression and control, and proved that, given time, Perth can play into the batsmen's hands as well as the bowlers'.

Stewart also found this to be the case, and by the end, was batting with a fluency seldom seen on his trips Down Under. It was a timely piece of resistance from England's old stagers, although it did little more than confirm that the patient still has a pulse, despite its 16-year coma.

Rumours have been mounting of a disturbance in the Force. David Morgan, the new chairman of the English Cricket Board, is in town, and his stated aim is to have English cricket at the top of the tree by 2007. He doesn't have the demeanour of an assassin, with his grey suit and apologetic eyes, but he is a man with a mission, and frankly, any mission will do – the current one has been aborted after 11 days.

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