defeat makes me sick as a pigeon

Ponting (left) grins from ear to ear.

By Dave Tickner

I once spent twenty minutes sitting on a park bench in Nottingham the morning after a one-day international, with a thunderous hangover, watching a scrawny pigeon peck disconsolately at a patch of dried sick. In the pouring rain.

I distinctly remember thinking it was the single most depressing thing I had ever witnessed, and it really was.

Until now.

England's abject surrender on day five in Adelaide is in with a bullet at number one.

There was something about this that lifted it high above your typical, run-of-the-mill England batting collapse, and it wasn't just Ricky Ponting's smug little pug face grinning from ear to ear.

I've seen countless even sorrier England batting performances, but none has affected me like this.

Perhaps it's the fact that England just don't do it as often as they once did, or perhaps it was the slow-dawning realisation that Paul Collingwood is our best player. Maybe it was the ease with which England tossed away four days of largely honest endeavour and even occasional brilliance, contriving to lose a match from a position of almost impenetrable security that had been held since the second morning. Maybe it was the fact the umpiring was (almost) as inept as the batting.

Or it could be the three Tests of a doomed series that remain for England to try and conjure even more depressing and astonishing means of defeat. Continuing to pick Ashley Giles, for example.

But I think what lifts the Adelaide debacle into the heights is the sheer length of time the misery and agony was drawn out for.

This was not a team blown away in a session - England's collapse of nine for 60 took a soul-destroying four hours and seemed to last far, far longer as each batsman trapped himself in strokeless purgatory, seemingly for weeks on end before his inevitable downfall.

It was the cricketing equivalent of Chinese water torture, with every passing maiden over another drip sending the English observer closer to madness, and left me wanting to slice my own head open and scrape out the memories with a rusty spoon.