FAIL TO PREPARE, PREPARE TO FAIL

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Flintoff - under-prepared.

By Frank Malley, PA Chief Sports Writer

Andrew Flintoff's team were one of the worst prepared bunch of professional sportsmen ever to leave English shores.

That is the inescapable truth after England succumbed to the inevitable defeat in the third Test in Perth to surrender the Ashes with barely a whimper.

It would be churlish not to give Australia credit. They might be ageing but they remain teak-tough and in Ricky Ponting had a captain with a passion to right the failings in England in 2005.

But it is not good enough for Flintoff to say: "It has not quite come off for us. It has not been through lack of trying or lack of effort."

Instead Flintoff and coach Duncan Fletcher must answer some hard questions.

Who in their right mind selects two players in Ashley Giles and James Anderson who through injury had barely turned their arms over in more than a year?

Who picks Geraint Jones, a wicketkeeper deficient in the basic skills of catching the ball, when a specialist is readily available in Chris Read?

Those are not selection issues given 20-20 vision through hindsight. They were apparent and voiced by England fans and critics long before the team left for the southern hemisphere.

The culpability of the leaders of this tour does not stop there. Far from it.

The schedule was flawed with too few games to iron out problems before the Tests began.

In a spurious attempt to do things on the cheap the penny-pinching England and Wales Cricket Board did not pay for selectors David Graveney and Geoff Miller to accompany the team.

The big decisions, therefore, came down to an uneasy cross between Flintoff's whim and the more studious approach of Fletcher.

Too often Flintoff's personality appears to have won the day and lost the match.

Never was that more true than in the selection in Brisbane and Adelaide of Flintoff's big pal Giles ahead of Monty Panesar.

Just when England needed a bold statement to kick-start the series, Flintoff chose caution ahead of aggression.

Quite why he and his team went against every natural instinct in his own ebullient psyche we might never know. But he did and he should rue that decision for the rest of his career, especially after seeing Panesar take eight wickets in Perth and confirm his potential as a match-changing bowler.

But when every detail of this hapless tour has been dissected it is not just the organisers and the leaders who must recognise their lamentable contributions. Players must also shoulder blame.

Men such as Steve Harmison who England needed to spearhead the attack but who sent the first ball of the series at the GABBA in Brisbane hurtling towards the WACA in Perth.

That monstrous wide betrayed the nerves and uncertainty of a man and a team who no longer believed.

Andrew Strauss suffered several unlucky dismissals but also contributed to his own downfall with the sloppiest of pulls and hooks.

Alastair Cook has style as he proved with his battling century in Perth and that augurs well for the future but there are still issues to be sorted concerning the geography around his off-stump.

Ian Bell and Paul Collingwood emerge with some credit, as does the belligerent Kevin Pietersen, but for Jones this tour surely proved beyond doubt that he is an impostor at this level.

Harsh, perhaps, but the evidence was there in the squandered catches, missed stumpings and mental fragility with which he surrendered his wicket.

Put simply, when England needed a match-winner with the pressure at its height there was no-one at home.

That is what will hurt Flintoff most of all. The big, bluff Lancastrian has honed his reputation on larger-than-life heroics with bat and ball and beerglass.

He claimed the captaincy would only sharpen his hunger for the fight. As it turned out, just like Ian Botham a quarter of a century before him, the heavy burden damn near broke him, his lone half-century in Perth coming when it was too late.

Again lack of preparation is probably the key, Flintoff having barely bowled before the Tests due to recovering from an ankle operation.

He claimed he was 100% fit, but the lack of fire and the missing yard of pace suggested otherwise.

'Freddie' was not ready for the biggest test of his cricketing career and Fletcher must rue being persuaded to burden his finest all-rounder when Strauss was willing and available.

So many mistakes, so much woolly thinking which made the euphoria of Trafalgar Square just 15 months ago such a distant memory.

On that day Flintoff had said: "To be a great team we have to beat the Aussies in their own backyard."

Embarrassingly, England did not come close. And an old sporting adage came to mind. Fail to prepare, prepare to fail.