What a letdown for lovers of Test cricket in both England and Australia. After just six playing days, the Ashes series between the two old enemies is all but decided. England needs to win all three remaining Tests to regain the Ashes, a feat that only one side has ever achieved: the 1936 Australians, who had a young batsman named Don Bradman.

The Australian media has relished the unexpected chance to put the boot into the beleaguered England side

Having lost the first Test in Perth in record time, and in the second in Brisbane showed little of the patience and ball-by-ball judgment vital to Test success, the England team has been hammered by media and fans alike. Even fanatical members of England’s travelling Barmy Army have voiced their frustration and despair.

And why wouldn’t they? Those fans who committed thousands of pounds in following their team halfway around the world have not just been short-changed, they’ve been well and truly gypped. They expected to see a world-beating team carrying all before it with its whirlwind Bazball: what was delivered in Perth and Brisbane was a damp squib, a car stuck in top gear when the state of the game, and the conditions, demanded frequent changes up and down.

In their second innings in Brisbane, captain Ben Stokes and all-rounder Will Jacks showed their teammates that Test cricket was not just a game of reverse sweeps and soaring ramp shots into the stands. They were prepared to graft and dig in, not give their wickets away to flights of fancy and rushes of blood. Only one side has turned up to play Test cricket, and that is the Australians: bereft of their elite bowlers Pat Cummins and Josh Hazlewood in both matches, and veteran opening batsman Usman Khawaja from halfway through the first Test, Australia showed application and discipline with both bat and ball. In Brisbane, stand-in captain Steve Smith successfully bent the pace of the day-night match, with its pink ball, to give his batsman the greatest chance of batting in benign daylight conditions – assisted by the dogged tail-end batting of bowlers Mitch Starc, Scott Boland and Michael Neser – while leaving England’s batsmen to bat under lights with the ball swinging dangerously in the dewy evening air.

With key players hors de combat, their places taken by journeymen like Neser and debutants including opening batsman Jake Weatherald, and a rearranged batting order thanks to Khawaja’s injury, Australia is proving less a team of champions and more a champion team. The Australian media has relished the unexpected chance to put the boot into the beleaguered England side; after all, ‘Pommy-bashing’ has been Australia’s other national sport for over two centuries.

The England team deserves what it’s getting. The arrogant hubris shown by the English camp in the run-up to the Ashes in its slavish devotion to Bazball, highlighted by Stokes labelling past greats of the game as ‘has-beens’ for daring to question their approach and preparation for Australia, has got its just reward. Yet, just when it’s clear to everyone else that Bazball is dead and buried, and the key to any success in the remainder of the series is patience, discipline and intense practice, the English players are taking what they’re calling a ‘mid-tour break’ at the ritzy Queensland beach resort town of Noosa Heads.

It’s easy just to blame the players and coaching staff, especially Stokes and head coach Brendan ‘Baz’ McCallum. But step forward the England Cricket Board. It was the ECB, not the players, which decreed the playing programme in Australia involves no first-class matches outside the Tests, other than a warm-up match not against a local side, but the touring England Lions second team. After the debacle of the two-day first Test, there was only one opportunity to give Test players pink-ball exposure before Brisbane: a festival one-day Lions fixture against a Prime Minister’s XI. Yet none of the Test XI were released to play.

Contrast that laughable preparation to the last pre-Packer tour when England won the Ashes in Australia. The Tests then merely headlined a three-month programme taking Ray Illingworth’s team around the country, maximising the team’s preparation and familiarity with the local conditions so different to home. The MCC team (as it then was) played full first-class matches, at Test grounds, against each State side at least once. Opposition teams featured past and present Australian Test players as well as top local performers and overseas players of the calibre of South Africa’s Barry Richards and England’s Tony Lock.

With that preparation and day-in, day-out cricket, England had a crucible forging an Ashes-winning team which, in the last day of the last Test in Sydney, held its nerve defending a small total to wrest Australian hands off the revered urn. There was no hit-and giggle, no disrespecting the opposition or the conditions, and no hubristic boasting. The most Illingworth would admit to on arrival in Australia for the tour was that he was ‘confident’ England would do well. Take note, Ben Stokes – and Piers Morgan.

Such long tours won’t come again: the voracious administrator and broadcaster appetites for lucrative one-day and especially Twenty20 cricket put paid to that. But wherever they travel, English tourists still need enough red-ball cricket around a Test series to give themselves the best shot of not only doing well, but winning. That Stokes’s team haven’t had this in Australia is the ECB’s fault, aided and abetted by their Cricket Australia counterparts, and they’re paying the price for their administrators’ folly.

If the administrators of the game don’t take Test cricket seriously, why should the players? Calling for England players to be dropped may ease the pain of a double defeat debacle, but when their own board fails them by sending into the arch enemy’s den so woefully underprepared, it’s not their heads that should roll first.