Sixteen years to win them back. Fifteen days to lose them. That’s one press box formulation I’ve already heard for England’s Ashes defeat. In fact, it doesn’t do the Australian effort justice. This campaign to recapture the Ashes has genuinely been 462 days in the making. It’s been fascinating to watch the systematic nature of the Australian preparation for this series – not least because of its contrast with England’s ‘it’ll-be-all-right-on-the-night’ thinking.

I remember the first inkling I had of it. In England last year, I had been taken aback by how casual the Aussies’ net sessions seemed to be. Then, during the ICC Super Series one-dayers at Docklands, the Australians began coming out during the intervals and doing seriously sharp fielding routines, severely showing up the Fred Karno’s Army of the World XI. I’ve felt that note of intent and intensity in their cricket since. Having not seen England between times, I’ve been taken aback by the slippage in their standards. As in 2005, the trophy was won by the team that wanted it more, and that planned, selected and executed accordingly. No real cricket fan can be other than satisfied with that.

I’ve written about the contrast in preparation for tomorrow’s Guardian, so I won’t say more here. Having been toasted on the front and frozen on the back for five days, furthermore, I’ve buggered my neck and need some physio, so I’ll save further musings for after the three-hour flight to Melbourne - which I’m now really looking forward to! As I write this, Michael Hussey is in the middle of the ground sharing beers and posing for photos with the WACA support staff. Nice bloke. Feel free to lavish praise on him and others.

	Shane Warne showed 'the depth of his character, competitiveness, obstinacy and optimism' on the fourth day at Perth © Getty Images

When you’ve as many Test wickets as Shane Warne, I suppose you can afford to be philosophical. But if ever a bowler deserved more for his dedication, it was Warne yesterday, who ended the day with 1 for 100 for 31 fierce, feisty and fun overs.

Great as he is on days like the last at Adelaide, where his self-belief fuels an entire XI, I somehow relish him more in situations like this, where he shows the depth of his character, competitiveness, obstinacy and optimism. I’ve tried to convey some of those depths in a couple of pieces for the Guardian today, although I so enjoy watching Warne bowl that it’s almost a shame to spoil it by writing: it’s like explaining a magic trick.

Warne simply never lets a ball go without expecting a wicket. When some do not, he is obstupefied. He reminds me of a story that John Rutherford told me about that ornery all-rounder Cec Pepper, who some will know as a pioneer of the flipper.

Pepper was bowling one day to Frank Worrell, and released a delivery with a cry of: ‘That’s it!’ It was: Worrell was bowled. When team-mates gathered excitedly round Pepper and asked about the ejaculation, he explained simply: ‘As soon as I let it go, I knew there wasn’t a man alive who could play that ball.’

At the press conference after yesterday’s plan, Glenn McGrath paid Warne pointed treatment: his late wickets were Warne's as much as his own. Standing at the back of the presser as I usually do, I also saw a nice moment as Cook left, McGrath entered and most of the crowd were fussing over their tape recorders. As they passed, McGrath shook Cook’s hand warmly: ‘Well batted. Great effort.’ It could have been two blokes from rival clubs after a Saturday game; the Australians' magnanimity where opponents are concerned is one of their most endearing qualities.

Maybe I should have asked McGrath what he thinks of Rudi Koertzen, seeing he was another batsman who received a distinctly speculative decision from him on the first day. Or Michael Clarke whom he fired at Lord’s, and at Sydney during the Super Test. Or...well, I could go on. Just so we’re clear: there’s nothing partisan in my low opinion of Koertzen’s umpiring. Nor am I rushing to judgement. Yes, umpires do make mistakes: replays showed that Steve Bucknor sawed Strauss off in Adelaide, but Bucknor's umpiring this summer has otherwise been excellent so criticism would be unwarranted. Umpires, though, are also open to criticism. The whole idea of the ICC Elite Panel is that some umpires are better than others. How else are we to know this than by critical evaluation of their performances? For the record, I think the best umpires in the world at the moment are Mark Benson and Simon Taufel. What a shame neither will umpire an Ashes Test.

Some commenters this morning have responded with doubt and asperity to my remark that Adam Gilchrist 'may not be the greatest wicketkeeper batsman in history'. It was mainly a rhetorical construction, but it brought us back to the never ending debate about how well a keeper should be expected to bat: it's no longer, I agree, a question of whether a keeper should be able to bat at all. The answer, I think, will always depend on the team: an XI with two spinners and a solid all-rounder at number seven, for instance, will place a greater accent on glovework than an XI with four fast bowlers and no all-rounder.

For the record, I think Alan Knott is the greatest wicketkeeper batsman in history. I do, however, think that Gilchrist is the greatest batsman wicketkeeper, and that it's a shame he never had the opportunity to bat at number six for an extended period. I am also persuaded that, at his best, Don Tallon was the greatest keeper - Sir Donald Bradman is not a bad advocate to have in your corner. Who you picked would depend on your team. Any other candidates?

As for the Strauss lbw, I don't think it's material to say that it 'looked out' on TV. The effect of the elevated view of the TV cameras, which inevitably distorts height, is most pronounced where lbw is concerned. It is a truth universally acknowledged that this Perth pitch is a bouncy one: any umpire, therefore, should have at the back of his mind that balls short of a length, unless they very obviously stay down, will tend to pass over the stumps more often than not. Aleem Dar did, quite rightly, when he gave Hayden not out yesterday on 65 (he gave a poor decision against Katich at Trent Bridge last year, which may have made him more circumspect). Koertzen did not (if he thinks about much, he hides it well). And this was not even close: the ball hit above the knee roll, and was shown to be passing over the stumps by a foot and a half. To be fair, it can sometimes be difficult to pick up the height of an impact on a white-clad batsman. My own view is that umpires should more often consult with their square leg colleagues, generally better placed to give altitude guidance. But that may be easier said than done. I'd welcome comments from umpire readers.

On a day of centuries, the first and one of the more important was registered by the thermometer. The temperature was 38 celsius (100.4) at noon; 39.5 (103.1) at lunch, Hussey having just miscued a pull shot at Harmison over the head of slip for four. Had anyone requested a fried egg at the interval, the top of Harmison’s head would have come in handy.

The sun blazed. The ground seemed to shimmer. Breathing was like inhaling the backdraft of a jet engine. Spectators on the WACA’s grassed areas could be observed fanning themselves with their ‘Tonked’ placards – equivalent of the npower ‘4’ and ‘6’ boards. It is a wonder that keen-eyed sponsors did not equip the players with their own.

Australia, meanwhile, showed all the application that had eluded them, and then England, on the first two days of the match. Michael Hussey and Michael Clarke added 151 at five an over without attempting anything extravagant. England toiled – how they toiled! Yet this was staving off of the inevitable. At times, the play resembled the middle overs of a one-day match; then, in the last hour, it swung violently towards Twenty20 territory.

That was when Adam Gilchrist got going. Perhaps he is not the greatest wicketkeeper batsman in history - but surely no player in history has been better suited to the task of batting when his team is 400 ahead, it is 100 in the shade, and a 70m leg-side boundary beckons with a brisk wind to hit with. This was hitting of the highest quality and orthodoxy: there was nothing ugly, lusty or even particularly violent about it.

The day might have been different – slightly different – with a slightly different apportionment of luck in the first session. After disposing of Ponting, Harmison had a healthy lbw shout against Hayden (65), turned down by Aleem Dar: perhaps the chip of a bail too high, and probably a good decision. Panesar issued a piercing cry for a bat-pad catch against Hussey (15), turned down by Rudi Koertzen: another poor decision from an umpire who is simply not right often enough, having already done for Strauss once in the game and later to do him in again. When Hayden’s Kingaroy cut worked its way to deep fine leg for four, bowler Hoggard pressed a wrist band to his woebegone head like the character in a melodrama who had just been told of the bank’s foreclosure.

Panesar, in fact, was more patient than the Queenslander, eager to help down his lunch with a hundred, but who was foiled by a combination of loop, bounce and deviation. Hayden stripped his gloves off angrily, and one feared for his bat in the privacy of the dressing room; this was a wicket as deserved as any of Panesar’s in the first innings. Thereafter, however, Michael Hussey and Michael Clarke ensured that it was all one-way traffic, with a skillfully-constructed stand, and Flintoff’s imagination narrowed. Sajid Mahmood looked as short of his captain’s confidence as Shaun Tait at the Oval in 2005, bowling only two of the first 73 overs of the innings. With his ratio of seventeen Test overs this summer to six exclusive Guardian columns, Mahmood’s first wicket will probably justify a book.

Ponting set England 557: another reckless declaration! He set them 648 at Brisbane – not quite the 735 that buccaneering Bill Lawry set West Indies at Sydney in February 1969, but close. Here, though, the closure was ideally timed, at the moment of greatest psychological ascendancy, and Andrew Strauss fetched his third consecutive umpiring blunder: he must have exhausted his quota of luck for the tour by bagging a taxi in Perth. The end was close, but this brought it still closer.

	Panesar was welcomed to the wicket today with a universal cheer and after his full-blooded sweep for four from Warne, the roar shook the temporary seating © Getty Images

Panesar didn’t even bowl particularly well on the first day, struggling with the breeze in his face, and needing the support of his captain to get through a spell where he was too often short and wide. Nonetheless, the dimension he added to England’s attack was palpable: his dismissal of Gilchrist was a collector’s piece of slow left-arm bowling. So was his personality, infectious even in the field, where his presence had previously been depicted in such dismaying terms. His wicket-taking celebrations, of course, make Jean Borotra look like Steve Davis.

The wicket-taking party is cricket’s version of the rave: lots of unrestrained and frenetic activity in which it is hard to completely join. What happens on the other side of the boundary is connected in the event but not in the spirit. Panesar somehow unites the two occasions, behaving as we perhaps might ourselves. No sooner had he taken his first wicket on the first day than the Barmy Army was indulging in its choreographed ‘Monty Dance’, involving a lot of leaping and high-fiving. They kept it up – like most things they do – all day and with blissful abandon.

Panesar’s priceless quality, in a cricket world full of ‘going to work’ and ‘hard days at the office’, is innocence. He gives as dull a press conference as anyone – they’re always coming out well, but they have to land in the right areas – but on the field hides nothing. A couple of months ago, Graeme Smith warned that Panesar would face ‘an unbelievable amount of abuse’ from Australian crowds, some of which might be racist. It provided a headline for a day, but always seemed more a reflection of Smith’s flair for provocation than anything else. He was welcomed to the wicket today with a universal cheer, redoubled when he connected solidly with his first defensive shot. After his full-blooded sweep for four from Warne, the roar shook the temporary seating. After his straight-driven boundary from Clark, one half expected swooning females to shower the field in panties.

Likewise the lamentations and jeremiads about Panesar’s capture by English celebrity culture – as well meant as they might be – seem premature. In his book Late Innings (1982), the New Yorker’s baseball writer Roger Angell committed to print some sentiments that are worth calling to mind, from time to time, in the context of modern professional sport: ‘It is true that the smallest flutter of a spontaneous incident – in sports, or anywhere else in public life in this country – is now seized upon and transformed at once into a mass-produced imitation or a slogan or an advertising gimmick…It is dispiriting but we can’t let ourselves miss the moment of humour and exultation when it does come along, or deny its pleasure.’

Catch of the Day: Ian Bell usually looks all dressed up with no place to go when under the lid at short leg, but his squat, swivel and dive to collect Gilchrist’s edge was symbolic of England’s new resolve.

Ball of the Day: Bell was its undeserving recipient: the kind of which batsmen have nightmares, short, rearing, compelling a shot, doing enough to get the edge. At least, he can cite it as proof of his improvement since 2005: it is taking better deliveries to get him out.

Moment of the Day: For all the fun and frolic of plucky Panesar, the day’s decisive twist was the fall of Ricky Ponting. ‘He’s Out’ announced the newspaper posters when Bradman’s wicket fell; Ponting now needs as little introduction. The effect on England was like a pinch of snuff. It also underlined just how crucial was Giles’s drop at Adelaide – if it needed underlining.

Unsolicited advice of the day: ‘Why don’t you ring Michael Vaughan and ask him?!’ Anonymous Aussie fan in the Lillee-Marsh Stand as Andrew Flintoff indulged in lots of arm waving with Steve Harmison.

Time Shift: Thanks to WA’s adoption of daylight saving on 3 December, start time for Perth Tests is now 11.30am: a step back to the genteel days when Aussie Tests started at noon ahead of five-hour days, and another deviation from the standard 11am commencement (Brisbane, of course, has always kicked off at 10am, to accommodate the abrupt tropical nightfall). If this were a club ground, you would be playing a game of juniors in the morning. As it is not, nothing impedes the promenading of ex-players and media big-wigs on the square in search of reflected glory that is such a familiar spectacle of the modern Test.

Press Release: ’I am freezing cold, my chair keeps collapsing, the queues to the lavatory are enormous, and all the biscuits have gone’: thus, one of my normally stoical colleagues early in the afternoon. The first complaint was incontrovertible: I have been in warmer morgues. Because it is needed to cool the function room from which the media area has been cordoned off, the air conditioner is blowing like a Fremantle Doctor direct from the Arctic. A widescreen television has been installed, but is tuned to a grainy black-and-white image of the scoreboard, at which one keeps gazing because of the apparent likelihood that the camera will cut away to show Brian Luckhurst cover driving.

For some reason, too, the radio broadcast kept us company in the first session, so we know that the ABC’s air conditioner was supplying Kerry O’Keeffe with nitrous oxide; he guffawed and wheezed his way through the tensest hour of the series. Someone please put him out of my misery.

In a poll last year, readers of the Guardian and Observer declared Perth their favourite overseas city. English cricketers cannot have been overrepresented among the respondents. The thoroughfare into which one turns from Perth’s airport towards the CBD is Brearley Avenue. Mike deserves at least a street: he’s the only English captain to win a Test here.

The West Australian Cricket Association Ground had a wild and woolly wicket that season - MCC bowled the home state out for 52 and 78 in the tour match – and England sported perhaps its best pace attack of the modern era: Willis, Botham, Hendrick, Lever. What England would do for any one of these bowlers now. Otherwise, the WACA has been an Australian playground, and its name evocative of pace, bounce, heat, light and, of course, wind – the Fremantle Doctor was to Dennis Lillee what the Sussex sea fret was to Maurice Tate.

The name WACA also conveys something else, referring to both association and ground. Owning its own ground has been both a blessing and imposition for the WACA. It has had a valuable asset against which to secure borrowings, and survived the Great Depression by flogging off the adjacent land for a trotting track. The challenges of providing for the arena’s upkeep now, however, are acute: the WACA looks, frankly, shabby. The fifty-year-old scoreboard is not ancient enough to be historic and not charming enough to be venerable; the twenty-year-old lights, like vertical concrete spatulas, are simply ugly; the temporary seating looks it. Yet nothing much savours of tradition here. A majestic new cast of Lillee, WA’s favourite son and now the chairman of the association, is to be unveiled on 22 December – but outside the MCG, rather than his home sod.

Fortunately, there is a big difference between an empty and a full cricket ground, and Western Australians seem determined to enjoy themselves. Perth has been declared ‘Cricket City’ for ten days including the Test – a tribute to Michael Hussey, no doubt. He, Justin Langer and Adam Gilchrist provide the local content for fans. If Australia win it will be the first time the Ashes have been regained on this ground, and Ricky Ponting may be due to have a whole suburb named for him.

Perhaps the most revealing feature of Damien Martyn’s retirement announcement is the admission that he felt unequal to challenge of being ‘more than 100 per cent committed, dedicated, disciplined and passionate about the game’, as among Australians is now de rigueur. The minimum dedication standard was recalibrated last year when Matt Hayden said that he was ‘one billion per cent’ behind Ricky Ponting; the writing may have been on the wall for Marto ever since.

Figures were never uppermost when you watched Martyn bat, playing so late that he almost seemed to be procrastinating, although so easefully that he enjoyed less credit for application and more blame for carelessness than most. Journalists harped on his cheap dismissal under pressure in the Sydney Test against South Africa in January 1994, although what really held him back was that he didn’t break 50 in 21 first-class innings after being busted to Sheffield Shield ranks. He did not return from the wilderness a better player, but he was certainly more conspicuously dedicated, having partaken of that philosophy of Stuart MacGill’s: ‘When in Rome, do as Steve Waugh.’ No Australian batsman in his time was easier on the eye; noone had lovelier trademark stroke than his back foot drive through the covers. But having learned that talent could only take one so far, I suspect he understood better than most the difference between subsisting on ability and genuine body-and-soul conviction.

About fourteen months ago when a sport magazine asked me to name an Australian team for the Ashes series of 2006-7, I included Adam Voges simply for the sake of a new name. I should be modest about my powers of prescience: I expected great things of Simon Katich too. Martyn’s retirement also provides another opportunity for Andrew Symonds, and further opportunity for Michael Hussey, whom it now seems sensible to promote to number four, and for whom billion per cent dedication is merely a preliminary bid.