Monday, December 2, 2002 Nasser Hussain arrived in Australia as supposedly England's wiliest captain since Mike Brearley. He will depart as their biggest flop since Mike Denness. If that sounds unkind then it is unkind to Denness, whose 1974-75 team did win one Test, and several points for bravery. Hussain's men have made so little impression on the Australian public that last Friday Ian Chappell repeatedly referred to their single star performer as "Robert" Vaughan.

This has not spoiled the fun of the masses, who will never tire of watching grown Englishmen wilt and weep under a hot sun. But it has all seemed desperately hollow. Australians were promised a fight but given a farce. They were told stories of a captain who would stare them in the eye, but instead found a weak leader who looked the other way.

Hussain's greatest sin is to betray our expectations. He is a good captain who has led awfully. History will remember him as such: the man who promised so much, delivered so little and trudged off in humiliation.

So where to start in documenting his cavalcade of cock-ups? Enough words have been expended already on his witless decision to field first at Brisbane, where it was not so much the idea but his motives that were madness. "I was hoping," Hussain revealed in his newspaper diary, "to limit Australia to 300 for 5."

Such defeatism, on the first morning of a series, would see any Australian skipper sacked on the spot. In Hussain's case it merely overshadowed an even greater act of foolishness: his decision to bat first at Perth. Until last summer the batting side had lost six Tests out of six at the WACA, with no team topping 251 in their first innings. Here was Hussain's chance to let loose his thrusting young quicks and maybe, just maybe, expose Australia's shaky middle order. Instead, spooked by his Gabba nightmare, he opted to bat - thus sealing his team's fate, for the second time in three Tests, before a ball was bowled.

That's the story of Hussain's captaincy on this tour in a nutshell. Always reactive, never proactive. The height of cunning has been when he has waited two balls, rather than one, before moving a fielder to the spot where a ball has just been walloped. His field-placings and his deployment of his bowlers have been occasionally incisive - but mostly ragged. Any man who finds his captaincy skills publicly mocked by Merv Hughes can normally consider himself unjustly defamed. The truth is, though, Big Merv would have done a better job.

It is often claimed Hussain has been unlucky with injuries, but his has been the kind of bad luck you could see coming a mile off. To gamble on an unfit Darren Gough and Andrew Flintoff is one thing. To do so when your back-up fast men are injury-riddled youngsters - Simon Jones, Steve Harmison, Alex Tudor, Chris Silverwood - is tempting fate too far. On balance, England can count themselves fortunate that only two of those four have broken down.

Hussain, we can assume, had some degree of influence over team selection. So he must shoulder the blame here as well. England chose too many over-ripe underachievers. Alec Stewart looked like yesterday's man two years ago, so it is no surprise that his batting has been kamikaze-like and his keeping doddery. Andy Caddick has flunked the challenge against Australia before and was always odds-on to do so again. Ditto Craig White. There is much good young talent around England. Most of it is going to waste.

England's, and Hussain's, mistakes at the selection table were compounded by the itinerary. It is unclear who thought up the brainwave of abbreviated three-day warm-up games, but Hussain surely had some say in it. The result is that England have lost the Ashes before they've had a single decent hit-out.

On the field they have batted irresponsibly and bowled unimaginatively. It is their fielding, however, that best encapsulates their woes. Not just their catching, though that has been frightful enough, but their groundwork too. Like blind men grasping at rubber hexagons, England's infielders have struggled to pick the ball up cleanly all tour.

Their outfielders have had problems of their own. Australian boys, shortly after learning to crawl, are traditionally taught that when in the outfield you stand back on the fence, the logic being that running forwards is easier than running backwards. Yet time and again, particularly at Adelaide, potential sitters have sailed gaily over the heads of podgy English fieldsmen.

All these catastrophes, in part or in full, can be sheeted home to Hussain. His response has invariably been to declare that this is a great Australian side. And maybe it is. Certainly Australia's bowlers have been threatening and their batsmen as cocky as ever; have so many Australians ever been caught, or more often dropped, slogging into the deep? But their fielding, with Mark Waugh retrenched and Justin Langer on sick leave from short leg, has been patchier than at any time since the bad old days of the 1980s. Superior rivals would have made them pay.

So England would be wrong to blame this latest disaster on Australia's strengths rather than their own shortcomings. But nor should they go back to the drawing board. County cricket, though there is too much of it, is decent. England's depth is impressive; their 2nd and 3rd XIs would test Australia's. This defeat must be kept in perspective. The selectors picked the wrong men and the captain had a shocker. Look no further than that.

Which is a bit of a shame, really, because there's a lot to like about Hussain. He is candid. He is protective of his players. He bats tigerishly. He has even, in foreign lands far from here, had his fair share of Brearleyesque moments.

But he's had his chance against Australia and muffed it. Spectacularly, memorably, gruesomely. So long, Nasser.

Chris Ryan is a former managing editor of Wisden Cricket Monthly and a former Darwin correspondent of the Melbourne Age.

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