Cricket: Gruelling first steps across a great divide

Success in an Ashes series must be the ultimate high in cricket and to achieve it in Australia would be extremely sweet. Make no mistake, winning them is the biggest and most exciting challenge for any English player. I have always wanted to experience this tour and I was delighted to be picked.

Not that I entirely expected to start the bid to reclaim the greatest prize in the sport by nearly missing the flight at Heathrow. Moving house can be a fairly stressful experience and my wife and I were expecting to exchange contracts on the day the team were leaving. Having received a frantic phone call I had to wait to the last minute to sign some papers before stepping on to the Emirates aircraft.

Touring can be great fun but the travelling can also be gruelling. This trip to Australia totalled nearly 30 hours, allowing us to become acquainted with the transit lounges in Dubai and Singapore. There were moments of light relief not least when an innocent air hostess asked Graham Gooch (the highest Test run-scorer for England) for his autograph thinking he was Mike Gatting (the largest appetite in the northern hemisphere).

This is a time for looking forward and I was happy indeed to see the back of the summer. The Test series against South Africa was physically and mentally draining (though the victory, of course, compensated hugely). Unfortunately, I was already fairly low, suffering regularly from bouts of tonsillitis which ended with a quick removal job.

On top of that the season for Middlesex was disappointing. The players should learn from the chastening results and I am confident that under Gatting's watchful eye as coach we will practise hard on the basics while always looking to modernise.

That is for next summer. Here we are now in Perth, our first stop on tour and a place of mixed memories. Four years ago I was called up suddenly for the final Test and shared in a 158-run partnership with Graham Thorpe. It was, though, a match England lost badly. It saw the retirements of Gooch and Gatting and me bowling on the first morning of the game (an ominous sign).

Perth is a beautiful place with lovely beaches and a nice, relaxed lifestyle (certainly compared with London). I spent a season here playing club cricket and experienced the tough Aussie attitude at close quarters, which manifests itself in never being slow to show precisely what they are thinking. The facilities are top-notch but things can get a bit steamy. We played one game in a temperature of 44.5C. It was that year I watched Australia play West Indies at the WACA. After three days of 40-plus temperatures the cracks in the pitch opened up so wide that Curtly Ambrose was stumped when his bat got stuck in one as he tried to regain his ground.

The team are in good spirits and looking forward now to the first net. It is a long time since we saw Gatting's team celebrating the recapture of the Ashes - 12 years to be precise - and Australian cricket has grown since then. As we have seen from the performances of some of their players in county cricket, they have strength in depth.

Quite rightly, they start as favourites. But that suits us since the pressure will be on them to perform at home. Our squad possess a good knowledge of the conditions here with Alec Stewart, Mike Atherton and Gus Fraser all making their third representative trip. Most of the guys have played club cricket somewhere in the country and Alan Mullally and Ben Hollioake spent their childhood years in Perth.

Fitness will be an important factor because we must cope with a hot climate, big outfields and and constant air travel moving through time zones. With that in mind it is welcome to see England picking from a pace attack which is fit and well. Out of the six seamers here four are 6ft 5in or above which will definitely help in extracting bounce from the pitches, especially when the ball loses its shine. The other two, Dominic Cork and Darren Gough, have swing and pace to create problems.

On the batting front it was splendid to see Mark Butcher really come good in the summer, forging a solid opening partnership which is so important. We also welcome back our own pocket battleship in Graham Thorpe. He is a class player with a free-scoring, counter- attacking style that can take the initiative away from the opposition. He has a good record against the old enemy and is vital in the middle order.

I suppose the crucial question will be whether the pitches turn. I think I overheard Robert Croft offering to supply Mullally with new spikes every game, hoping to get some rough to bowl in. We must counter any challenge put before us to win. We must knit together and forge an unbreakable team spirit. Australia seem to have plenty of that, putting up a superb effort in Pakistan.

Their batsmen have been in the runs, they seem to have unearthed another talented leggie in Stuart McGill. But we have our own form to find. Our programme here is to have a few days acclimatising, trying to get to sleep before 5am as Perth is eight hours ahead of the UK. We will then be set for the opening match against an ACB XI on Thursday at Lilac Hill, where it is rumoured the oppo have got a couple of young quickies by name of Lillee and Thomson.