James Lawton: Australia are a ruthless winning machine

The Independent's Chief Sports Writer on what makes Australia such a successful team on the world stage

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One of Shane Warne's more withering lines of propaganda is that England would not have the beginnings of an Ashes challenge without their heavyweight foreign mercenary Kevin Pietersen.

It is an insidious slur because anyone who was in Australia for the last series knows that something rather more basic than English cricket talent is on the line in the first Test in Cardiff.

What it is, in the context of sport at least, is a question of manhood, English manhood that is.

Heaven and all of Down Under knows that this particular branch of masculine pride |didn't have its finest hour when the Aussies extracted maximum and often exquisite revenge for their loss in England four years ago.

The Australians certainly exerted, from that first catastrophic moment on a steamy morning at the Gabba, when Steve Harmison sprayed his first delivery all the way to Andrew Flintoff at second slip, until the final rituals of the 5-0 whitewash, a competitive superiority, a way of thinking and fighting way beyond the grasp of their opponents.

You saw the cavernous gap between the psychology of the teams in a brief but telling cameo at the end of that first crushing victory in Brisbane. One of England's most experienced players, spinner Ashley Giles, was explaining the mood of his team-mates in the bus to the Gabba. "Yes, there was a lot of pressure," said Giles. "We know how hard the Aussies would be trying to win back the Ashes, we had a very strong sense of that." As Giles painted a picture that lacked only Gary Cooper striding into Main Street at high noon, the most combative Justin Langer watched with what was plainly a degree of disbelief.

"I can't believe the Poms were affected by the pressure at the start of a series," said Langer,

who had been so ruthlessly worked over by Harmison in the first Test in England, at Lord's, and showed up the Gabba with the plainest possible relish for a resumption of a battle.

England, robbed of the leadership of the injured Michael Vaughan – such a vital factor in the triumph in England – carried a somewhat different demeanour. It was almost as if Giles was admitting that the Aussies had invaded English minds. Langer cheerfully discussed the imperatives of Test cricket. "What you are in this level of cricket for is the pressure – it's the great stimulation of all. You want to play every moment with an edge on it. If you don't have pressure bearing down on you, you don't have the meaning of Test cricket."

Ponting, too, was happy to revel in the psychological factors that had seemed to be such potent forces in the Gabba Test and which, as the series unfolded so destructively, seemed to grow in significance with each new challenge.

The Aussie captain said: "Quite frankly, I knew the boys would be up for it right from the get-go. People ask me if it's been tough preparing the team after losing in England. Tough job? In some ways it was the easiest a captain could ever face. And do you know when I first realised it was going to be like this? It was when we flew back from England. You could see it in their eyes. They couldn't believe

they had been responsible for losing the Ashes – quite frankly we've spent a large part of our lives waiting for this series to begin."

Will England display such a sense of injured pride at Cardiff? Will the wounds of Brisbane and Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane and Sydney demand so fervently to be healed?

It would be pleasant to think so but quite apart from the embarrassing exit from the World Twenty20 for England – Australia had the alibi that it is not a form of cricket which will ever strike them as much more than a lark – nothing in the pattern of English cricket since 2006 has suggested even the beginnings of a concerted sense of team. The Pietersen captaincy fiasco left Andrew Strauss with the massive job of attempting to recreate the spirit that flowered so thrillingly in 2005. What this intelligent and self-motivated cricketer couldn't say publicly, though inevitably must have thought privately, was that if the flower was beautiful it was also extremely fragile.

This, you also have to guess, was the suspicion of the Ashes-winning captain Vaughan. Soon after the celebrations at Trafalgar Square and Downing Street, and the sight of the heroic Flintoff so glassy eyed he might have been looking for a pedalo rather than the salute of the nation, Vaughan spoke soberly about the challenge facing him and his now lauded team.

"The greatest challenge facing us," said Vaughan, "is to stay honest. We can't see winning the Ashes as the end. It can only be seen as a beginning. If we don't keep sight of that we will have lost the meaning of what we achieved."

By the time England were unravelling in the Australian series that achievement seemed beyond recall by even the most diligent search party. The late Bob Woolmer, former England batsman and then the coach of Pakistan, had made similar points to Vaughan as he prepared his team for the challenge of meeting the men in possession of the Ashes. "It will be very interesting to see how England react to their success," said Woolmer. "They have to put it behind them and push on with the job of improving themselves. In cricket, there is never a point where you can sit back and say, 'Great, we're the finished article now'."

Ponting's predecessor Steve Waugh made a similar point when in his last victorious Ashes sweep through England he was injured before the fourth Test at Headingley. The series was academic now, the Ashes once again retained as Australian property, and the leader of a different breed of cricketer might have been inclined to spend his time on the pavilion terrace and reflect on another crushing success. Instead, Waugh fumed at the Australian defeat – and spent the rest of his time working on his recovery on the rugby field behind the main stand. "You can never take your grip off the throttle," said Waugh. "You have to go out and play as if every match will determine how people will always think of you. More importantly, how you will think of yourself."

Naturally, the wounded Waugh played at The Oval. Naturally, the Australians restored their dominance with a victory by an innings and 25 runs. Waugh, despite excruciating pain, scored an undefeated 157. Now was this a piece of unnecessary bravado – or a classic example of how a new and substantially untested Australia will hope to be seen in the next few months? If anyone in England is unsure of the answer, they do not quite understand the nature of England's challenge. It is not only to play good cricket. It is to behave like men, something they failed to do the last time these teams met. The call, as Warne hints, is not so much on a talented South African but the raw material of somewhat neglected English manhood.