Whitewash looms

After a fourth consecutive hammering, the English press are gearing up for an Ashes whitewash and talk as one about how the tour continues to lurch from one disaster to another. In The Guardian Mike Selvey dissects the innings and 99-run defeat and struggles to find anything that England can be proud of.

Now Sydney looms, and if there is an echo of the situation from four years ago, when England went on to win the final Test in grand style, then at least they had given Australia a scare in the penultimate match. They would have rattled them more this time if they had hidden round the corner from the dressing room and gone "Boo!" as Ricky Ponting took his side on to the field.

In The Times Christopher Martin-Jenkins says that although Andrew Flintoff is likely to pay for England's failures with his captaincy role, the other players also need to share the blame and, after Melbourne, especially Kevin Pietersen.

The home team have made a point, in print and in press conferences, of praising Pietersen’s skill whenever possible. Perhaps they believe that it will go to his head. It would certainly not be beyond the plans of John Buchanan, the Australia coach, to see him as a means of dividing the England dressing-room and thereby of ruling them.

And over at The Independent, James Lawton says that it isn't the margins of defeat which are the worst point, but England's inability to show some Australian fight in their performances.

Defeats, even a stark row of four of them and by such wide margins, are not the worst of it. It is the terrible sense that this is a team which can give only lip service to the principles by which Australian cricket lives so triumphantly, so enduringly.

And for a flavour of how the tabloids are reporting England's demise, Dean Wilson in The Mirror says that the chance of avoiding a whitewash are almost nil.

A whitewash would have been unthinkable in 2005 after all the sweat and tears of more than 16 years had secured the Ashes for England, but with the five-nil scoreline a probability in Sydney the only thoughts now are ones of desperation.