A Chill Wind

There's something supremely enjoyable and evocative about listening to Test Match Special as you walk through your home town in a snowstorm, with the pale light of a freezing December morning slowly making itself felt and the cold stinging your face like a sharp catch stings the hands. Christopher Martin-Jenkins, sheltering from the Perth heat, dutifully said something about welcoming listeners waking up on 'a frosty morning in England', but round my way it was a bit more severe than that.

Things were similar in another part of the WACA. A few hours before, a chill went through an England dressing room which has barely missed a beat since Brisbane, as Mitchell Johnson finally remembered what he was supposed to be good at. Six rapid victims later and match and series had taken on a different hue. A few of us - a bit like it used to be with snow itself in the days when English winter after English winter would go by without a hint of the stuff - had forgotten in three weeks that Australians could actually play cricket.

The characteristically fluent 62 which Johnson made on the first day was vital. An interview with him in the last Wisden Cricketer revealed him to be sensitive about his failures in England in 2009 and the type of player whose confidence needs regular regeneration. While the nets with Troy Cooley will have assisted with the mechanics of his technique, the reminder of his capabilities and the justification of his place which his runs gave him will have helped him to conquer his anxieties and bowl as he did.

England will need a supreme effort tomorrow to haul themselves back into the game, but this is not to say that all the Australians have left their demons behind. While his team suddenly look stronger on the back of a good day, the future for Ponting still looks clouded with an uncertainty which only a series victory and major runs will dispel.

Fletcher Must Go

Typical. You take a few days off from the blog to get ready for Christmas and let the dust settle after the end of the Ashes and, far from settling, it continues to swirl around you like the fog that's been blanketing much of Britain this week. The past, present and future of English cricket is debated to death, and, just by way of variety, another crackpot squad emerges from the brains of the England selectors. Oh, and Shane Warne retires.

Virtually everything you can think of (and a few things which you can't) has been said about England after Perth. And most of it carries a fair bit of truth. They were under-prepared, the Brisbane and Adelaide teams were badly selected, Australia have wanted to regain the Ashes more than England have wanted to retain them, and Fletcher has reached his sell-by date. All that and a one-day squad with Paul Nixon in it.

One of the better analyses of England's situation came from Christopher Martin-Jenkins in The Times earlier in the week, which allowed for the fact that England have played some good cricket at times by pointing out that the genesis of England's defeat lay in one really bad day in each game - the first in Brisbane, the last in Adelaide and the second in Perth - but also mentioned the older but more far-reaching errors which conspired to put England in a position from which retention was going to be much more difficult than redemption. The loss of Troy Cooley to his native Australia, the failure to prepare properly, errant selection, going back to the inclusion of Giles and Trescothick in the original squad ('an element of trying to recreate the old rather than trusting the new'), the decision to make Flintoff captain 'just as Strauss had grown into the job'.

It was a balanced critique and I agreed with most of it. It appeared to stop short, however, of calling for Fletcher's head, as most of the British tabloids have been doing, and, having thought over the series, while not denying how well England have played in parts or Fletcher's seminal influence on the improvements shown by the England side since 1999, I'm inclined to feel that we need to look elsewhere when the dust really has settled after this winter.

Justification? Well, we'll leave Monty out of it and return to the old Jones-Read debate. Thanks to Fletcher's misplaced confidence in the increasingly hapless Jones, we're now left with a situation where, if Read returns to the side in Melbourne (and, such is Fletcher's apparent obsession with Jones, I'm still not convinced that he will), he will do so in the knowledge that his own coach doesn't rate him at all, which can only have a negative effect on his confidence. So, we'll be left with two keepers who know that they're not first choice, a fact which was emphasized further yesterday when England's squad for the post-Christmas ODI series was announced. It contained the name of Paul Nixon, the elderly Leicestershire keeper who went on an England tour a few years ago but was generally felt to have dropped off the radar. I'll leave my favourite, Steven Davies, out of it for once; he's been with the academy in Perth and may not have done as well as was hoped. But what about James Foster? He was looking absolutely excellent late last season and is a hell of a lot younger than Nixon. Madness.

And then you have the inclusion of Vaughan. Okay, he's standing up, but he's only got three failures against Western Australia seconds behind him and his record in one-day cricket isn't very good anyway. Another example of trying to clutch at the straws of 2005 rather than moving on.

Past readers of this blog will know right well that, although I've known about and watched Chris Read for a long time, I'm not one of those people (most of whom live in Nottingham, I find) who think that he's the best keeper who ever drew breath. I even sought to try to understand Fletcher's selection of Jones at the start of the series (mainly because I just wasn't suprised), but, with hindsight, I was wrong.

With everything else left aside (Giles v Panesar is history), for his utterly shameful treatment of Read and his clumsily mistaken faith in Jones alone, Fletcher must go.

We'll look at this again when it's 3-2...