In his press conference cum inquest after the Melbourne Test, Andrew Flintoff offered the praise for his team and its retinue that they were ‘a fantastic blend of people’, which made it sound like he had put together a particularly successful dinner party. On the other hand, the combination of personalities does matter in a touring side. Yesterday, after my daily 2000 words, I popped out to Yarraville to watch composite teams from the Victoria Turf Cricket Association, in which I’m a player, and Free Foresters CC, the wandering English amateurs, whose wanderings have brought them to Australia this summer.

Free Foresters are one of those English clubs - see also I Zingari, Incogniti, Frogs, Cryptics, Yellowhammers et al - whose provenance and purpose leave Australians slightly puzzled, engendering tremendous loyalty with apparently no more than a dazzling blazer (crimson, green and white), mysterious symbol (a Hastings knot, loosely tied) and paradoxical motto (‘United, Though Untied’). Its origins lie 150 years ago in the Forests of Arden, famous as the backdrop to As You Like It, and of Needwood, not famous at all, and known only to tree tragics.

Eighty-eight Foresters have played for and thirty-three have captained their country, including Douglas Jardine, Gubby Allen and Colin Cowdrey, even if this is now more a vestige of the Gentleman/Players distinction: star player on this sojourn is Cambridge blue 'Nutter', who made a stroke-filled 114 yesterday, before his father-in-law Phil the Farmer came in to save the day with a forward prod or two.

Australia does not have a wandering club tradition, believing in associations, grades, fixture lists and home grounds, although that’s a historical and geographical outcome rather than a deep cultural aversion: when club cricket was organizing in the twenty-five years or so before the First World War, Australia was a pretty hard country to wander round. With travel cheaper and people more prosperous, that could change: Perth-based Forester Jerome Griffin is in the process of setting up an antipodean chapter of the club.

By all accounts, too, the touring party of players, wives, kids and friends have had more pleasure from Australia than Freddie’s ‘fantastic blend’, from youthful Joe the Teacher, who wore his Foresters tie for the duration of the flight from England, to elder statemen John the Slip and Jeremy the Veteran, apparently locked in intense rivalry over the number and variety of injuries they can sustain. They had just come from playing in my hometown, Geelong, and were full of praise for Darren Hauenstein and the South Barwon CC: ‘a great bunch of young guys who were everything good about club cricket’. The VTCA turned on an excellent afternoon tea – of a quality, it must be conceded, seldom seen in the association itself (albeit strangely devoid of that traditional Australian delicacy, the Barbecue Shape).

The ghost at the feast was Flintoff, whose team this season have so bitterly disappointed English hopes. Many heads were shaken, many chagrined words muttered. Free Foresters represent a love of cricket strong enough to travel long distances at considerable expense to unfamiliar grounds and an uncertain welcome; what do the rich and pampered England cricket team represent?

At his last press conference, Flintoff referred to the steadfastness of the Barmy Army, still singing, still chanting, still cheering despite all that has befallen his team: an endearing phenomenon, it is true, but a deluding one. English people, it is true, don’t necessarily scorn a beaten team; this, however, has been the kind of tour when one could very easily grow completely fed up with English cricket. What will it take to get through to England’s captain, their coach and hierarchy, how badly they have let their supporters down this summer?

Among many views of the Second Test, this next is among my favourites: an email from Tom White, a great servant of the Henty & District Cricket Club, who play in the Holbrook & District CA. I wrote the foreword to the club's history a few years ago: it is a little classic of its kind, populated by such legendary personages as Hulky, Daisy, Sticks, Slabba, Wilba, Maggot, Hooters, Rusty, PP, the Axeman and the Terror. I always enjoy Tom's perspective on the game - in this case, that of the hard-pressed man of the land....

"Whilst listening to the reflections of Peter Roebuck the other day on the wonderful twists and turns on the last day of the test I though once again about the old chestnut,” does life reflect cricket or does cricket reflect life”? We have had a lot of time to think lately, us farmers in Australia, and in particular those in the Riverina, (the food bowl of the nation? Not this year mate).

"I was thinking about how you can plan as much as you like and just nothing seems to go right, the conditions appear to be against you, blunting you best hopes. Australia on the first day. So you throw out the plan and do something completely foreign in the hope that someone else will do something for you. A government hand out possibly. So, you bowl round the wicket, outside the leg stump and wait??? Australia on the second day.

"Then you get back to some sort of basics and do want you know has worked in the past. Press on with some dependable tactics. Ponting, Hussey and Clarke on days 3 and 4. Then on the last day you get the luck and the rub of the green that’s been apparently missing for a while. Warne, Lee etc bowling well, decisions going your way and things again turn out OK.

"Therefore, Australia’s farmers, many who have been glued to the cricket as a form of release from the despair of the last few years, can look forward with some hope. We tried our best for a few years with not much happening. We’ve bowled round the wicket and hoped that someone else with make some decisions. We gone back to basics and pressed on regardless for a couple of years and managed to be still in the game somehow.

"Now, maybe next year will be our “last day”, when things go our way again. Some lucky decisions, possibly good old fashioned seasonal conditions to the fore, winding up with a big harvest, good cattle prices and a party at years end that puts many others to shame? Bring on Perth I say!!! So does cricket reflect life or does life reflect cricket?? I only did Ag Science at uni mate, not philosophy!! Keep up the good work Gideon, many people I know enjoy it lots. As a postscript I can hear Guru Bob mumbling in the background about the English having some difficulty in retaining the Ashes back in our lifetime? What do you reckon?"

I'm a Geelong supporter, Tom. Anything is possible.

	So much talent; so little pleasure © Getty Images

Back in Melbourne for a day, I’m shortly to heft my gear and head for training at the Yarras. Nothing, I find, makes you keener for cricket yourself than a few days watching it. This is actually the first summer I’ve forsaken the pleasure of my weekend game in order to cover a Test series. I even had misgivings about covering the Ashes of 2005, because of the dent it would leave in my pre-season - a period of the year I always love, when hope has not yet been dashed against the rocks of experience.

I can usually justify watching good cricket by what I learn from it. In Brisbane, I was positioned in the media overspill upstairs, at 45 degrees to the action: a superior vantage from which to admire the degree to which Shane Warne varies his speeds and trajectories, and to watch how far forward Kevin Pietersen stretched in playing him. In general, I always come away from watching top-class batsmen resolved to take a longer front foot stride, and bend my front leg more – which, of course, I immediately forget. I also noticed at the Gabba a little ritual of Matthew Hayden’s after letting the ball go, moving rhythmically back and forward from his final position, testing the balance and security of the platform erected by his footwork. Someone at training tonight will probably wonder aloud why I’m doing the Nutbush.

Yet, notwithstanding that I’m in the twilight of a mediocre career, I’d never gratuitously run down the game the Yarras play. We enjoy our cricket – a quality conspicuously lacking from England’s tour so far. For a weekend cricketer who gets by on the occasional glimpse the possible, a spectacle like Steve Harmison’s travails on the first day at Gabba is always poignant. We might bowl that way because we can’t help it; he can. So much ability, so little pleasure.

Australian players in general are far better at preserving the spark of fun in their cricket. A pioneer in this respect, I think, was Mark Taylor. I recall a press conference at the end of the Perth Test in February 1995. Amid much sapient and sympathetic nodding, Mike Atherton had lamented the glutted cricket calendar, saying it made for weary players and lower standards. When the proposition that too much international cricket being played was put to his Australian counterpart, Taylor replied, with that distinctive upward inflexion: ‘No. And I think I speak for all the blokes. I love Test cricket.’ The answer impressed me: I wasn’t surprised when they went on to beard the joyless West Indians in their den. Indeed, I've never heard a captain, before or since, and with such sincerity, use the word ‘enjoy’ when talking about cricket.

Although I’m missing a bit of cricket this summer, I don’t entirely lose the community of my club, for the Yarras have a sizeable diaspora. While in Brisbane, I caught up with Em, Big Al, Churchyard, Sis and Knockbax; in Adelaide, I’m looking forward to the company of Bloodbath. The Yarras might not be the biggest, strongest or richest cricket club going around - but by golly we care about nicknames. In this respect, JL, Haydos, Punter, Marto etc also have nothing to teach us.

	Matthew Hayden describes the Gabba pitch as ‘your best friend one day and your worst enemy the next’ © Getty Images

It was Ian Rush who said that he could never get used to playing football in Italy; it was like living in a foreign country. Something similar applies to playing cricket in Australia. The surroundings are reassuringly Anglophone, from the right-hand-drive cars to the voice on the speaking clock. But appearances can be deceptive.

Traditionally, Australia in Ashes cricket have enjoyed far greater advantage from their conditions than England have from theirs. Australia won 46 and lost 43 Ashes Tests in England, but their lead at home stretches 80 to 54 – empirical attestation of Len Hutton’s advice that a touring team must be 25% better than Australia to beat them in their own backyard.

On the eve of a series in which England seek to parallel Hutton's feat of retaining the Ashes, the challenge to the English cricketer coming here is worth articulating. Firstly, he finds that that the ball bounces higher and carries further, while also requiring more art to move sideways, encouraging shorter lengths and more cross-bat strokeplay.

Then he finds Australian cricket mores famously tough. Nasser Hussain says that he made an abiding enemy of Mike Gatting when he failed to walk for a nick behind while playing for Combined Universities against Middlesex in the late 1980s. Australian cricketers not only give no quarter, they expect none. When Mike Atherton stood his ground after a nick and was reprieved, he quipped to Ian Healy: ‘When in Rome…’

Good Australian cricketers always seem to mature more quickly than their English counterparts - in part, ironically, because they winter in England almost as a matter of course. This is chiefly in order to round their experience; also because sterling’s strength relative to the Australian dollar ensures a good payday. English players seeking to narrow the trade deficit in cricketers, meanwhile, have to grin and bear the contempt for the standards of their game. On the honour board at his club in Perth, Alec Stewart’s name bears the inscription ‘Midland-Guildford and England’. As Stewart explained in his autobiography: ‘Nobody rates county cricket.’

Factors to do with the country rather than the cricket are just as significant. Heat is inseparable from our cricket experience: the earliest written reference to cricket in Australia, in the Sydney Gazette & New South Wales Advertiser on January 8 1804, is in the context of ‘intense’ and ‘immoderate’ weather. When Australian players wear jumpers, as Mark Waugh used always to wear a sleeveless pullover, it is for luck rather than warmth. Our grounds, moreover, are getting hotter: increasingly built up, coliseum-style; they are no longer cooled by natural breezes, while our sharper light and darker shadows can pose problems for fielders, especially late in the day.

The Australian landscape is confronting. One of the Bodyline tourists is said to have written home: ‘Dear Father, This country is just hundreds and hundreds of miles of damn all, and then hundred of miles more of it.’ Australian fans need no introduction, their unabashed nationalism streaked with sentimentality, their bonhomie a kind of challenge. ‘Yeah, it’s a great country,’ a cab driver informed Jim Swanton sixty years ago. ‘Remember it’s yours as well as ours – and if you don’t enjoy it here, it’ll be your own ruddy fault.’

It is less accurate to describe specific Australian conditions, however, than to talk of their range. Just as no Test nation features venues further flung, none has venues so various, in their shapes, sizes, pitches, personalities and characteristic meteorologies. It notoriously took an eternity to standardise the rail gauges of Australia’s states; they never did attend to the cricket grounds. This is a factor, indeed, that has subtly inflected selections. First-class runs in Adelaide have generally been felt a tad cheap – thus Darren Lehmann’s long apprenticeship before international selection. First-class runs in Brisbane, especially before Christmas by an opener, have always been thought hard-won – thus Matthew Hayden’s recurrent opportunities, and his succinct description in today's Courier-Mail of the Gabba pitch as ‘your best friend one day and your worst enemy the next’.

Australian cricket, nonetheless, is undergoing some subtle shifts. For reasons not entirely unassociated with money, cultivating pitches in situ being seen increasingly as an expensive indulgence, conditions have undergone a convergence in recent years. Perhaps the most disorienting change has been the transformation of Perth, formerly the hunting ground of Garth McKenzie, Dennis Lillee, Terry Alderman and Bruce Reid, into a pitch conducive to spin. Seven years ago, Australia’s selectors worried that young Brett Lee might get carried away by its pace and bounce, and decided to delay his Test debut until Melbourne. Just a few months ago, the promising Victorian leg-spinner Josh Mangan decided that his best opportunity lay in crossing the continent.

Ricky Ponting and Glenn McGrath have both complained recently about the increasing homogeneity of local conditions – specifically, of course, the idea that Australia might be sacrificing some of its home ground advantage. A longer-term concern is that it could well take a toll on the variety of its cricketers. That Australia has a team of the talents at present is in part a testimony to the opportunities offered by its terrain.

Australia is not such an alien landscape for the visiting cricketer as it was. The country is more cosmopolitan; the tours are more metropolitan. Internal distances that used to tax patience and credulity have been diminished, and intercontinental distances are no longer so intimidating; it's impossible to miss the Barmy Army heraldry around Brisbane, while Andrew Flintoff commented during his press conference today on the ‘unbelievable’ number of Preston natives he has met while strolling round. Yet after five weeks in India, England have not been here long enough to acculturate the differences on the playing field. For all the endless discussion of injuries and optimum formations, do not underestimate the dimension of the series impossible to change: that Australia are at home, and England away.

	'Professionalism tends to further fuse man and sport, to the point where failure does seem like a personal reflection' © Getty Images

One of the surprising features of Trescothick’s travails is that they should have befallen so consummate a professional. English cricket has had its Tufnells and Lewises, its Hicks and Corks; but Trescothick’s game has been so steady, his technique so economical, his manner so unflappable. Perhaps, though, therein lay the dilemma, that he undertook to tour because there seemed no professional alternative open, as Thorpe confessed became his own default setting: ‘I kept playing because I felt it would help me keep a grip on things. What else was I supposed to do?’

The response to Trescothick following Thorpe’s example and standing out of cricket has actually been pretty encouraging. Jeff Thomson found the germ of a jest in there, but Thomson lavishes the same thought to his public statements as he famously did in his bowling, just shuffling up and going wanggg. It’s arguable he should never have been chosen; but it’s also arguable that his selection was a risk in the same way as the choice of any player recovering from injury is a risk, like [Andrew] Flintoff with his ankle, [Ashley] Giles with his hip or [Steve] Harmison with his passport. At least, England did not dither as they did, for instance, in 1994-95 with Phil Tufnell, who Mike Atherton wanted to send home after a psychological breakdown in Perth, but whose contract was sufficiently ambiguous to prevent it. Saying that England will miss his runs‚ is nonsense; he was obviously not in the frame of mind to make any.

The question has been asked whether cricket has anything to do with Trescothick’s condition. I’ve lost count of the number of times that David Frith’s voluminous study of cricket’s suicides, Silence of the Heart (1999), has been brought into discussions. Seminal book that it is, I think its quest for comprehensiveness obscures as much as it reveals, the causal relation between sport and suicide being in many cases inherently unprovable. Cricket, too, has surely prolonged a few precarious existences as well as perhaps shortening them. There’s no doubt, all the same, that batting especially can be a lonely business, with long periods of contemplation before and after, and little immediate opportunity to redeem failure. Even a club cricketer at my own absurdly humble level feels it. I’ve been out three times this season: one good ball, one bad shot, one poor decision. It’s only a game, but it smarts, resonating with other misfortunes, disappointments, and shortcomings. Professionalism tends to further fuse man and sport, to the point where failure does seem like a personal reflection. Professionalism also involves a more or less constant monitoring of one’s own physical and psychological well-being and preparedness. Nothing is more difficult for the melancholic temperament to bear. William Styron’s recent death caused me to revisit his powerful description of the depressive predicament, Darkness Visible, which he saw as analogous to that of the ‘walking wounded’‚ in war.

	‘I kept playing because I felt it would help me keep a grip on things. What else was I supposed to do?’ © Getty Images

Thorpe’s book shows this suffering in a sport scenario, as he strives to play cricket while his mind seethes with the stresses of a ruined marriage. The need for the pretence of normality becomes a devastating aspect of his condition: ‘I infuriated myself with the rubbishy soundbites I spouted to the press about how I’d been through a difficult period but was now feeling fine. I’d go back to my hotel room and think to myself: ‘How the fuck could you say that? When clearly you’re not all right?’ But I was trying to portray an image of my professional self as being back on my feet. Perhaps if I said it enough times it might actually come true. Thorpe’s book also scotches the temptation to imagine that Trescothick might have forborne his problems had he made runs in either of his innings on tour. Thorpe did make runs while feeling bad, and the need to concentrate was momentarily therapeutic, but the effect did not last; if anything, sporting success offered steadily diminishing satisfaction, and eventually gall and wormwood.

‘Yeah, well, you may have just got a Test hundred against Sri Lanka but did it really give you a lift? Depression gives no quarter: there is anguish in failure and futility in success.