I wish I could say I'd been there at Headingley in '81. Or Edgbaston. Or any of England's Ashes wins since I started following cricket in the early seventies. If we'd won this series, I was going to be there: by hook or by crook I was going to get to see the winning runs, the winning wicket, be there at the ground, so I could describe it to my son when he was old enough to understand.

I guess that won't be happening this time round.

Someone asked me why this particular series defeat depressed me more than the last Ashes defeat, or the one before. I've been asking myself, too, why I feel quite so numb, why I had to turn off the coverage rather than listen to the awards ceremony, why I won't be watching the highlights. Why it hurts.

It hurts because we're better than that. It hurts because we lost the Ashes in roughly 10 days of cricket, during which we only took 35 Australian wickets for 60 of our own. We only twice scored over 200, and both times Australia scored over 400 in the same game. It hurts, in short, because we weren't in the same ballpark. We got slaughtered.

Argue all you like that the selectors didn't pick the right people. I'll be the first to agree. "Continuity" they say, picking Croft over Tufnell. "Ability with a bat" was another factor. He's not there to bat. Croft made three and 0 at Trent Bridge. And Tufnell can win Test matches single-handed. He can be given one end for a session without fear of him getting smacked to all corners when it's not going his way.

"Form", they say, picking Ramprakash. Form, sure, but what about his Test record? Ward, too, has an obvious flaw in his technique. "All-rounder", they say and pick Stewart, who is woefully out of form with the bat, and in all honesty has been less of a batsman since he stopped opening with Atherton.

Sure, we were unlucky with injuries. Nasser's digits are a joke on TV ads now, they break so often, and poor old Thorpe just keeps getting injured. Vaughan's been unlucky with injuries too.

But we've had poor selectors before. Graeme Hick's had more comebacks than Frank Sinatra and Status Quo put together. We took Croft to the subcontinent last winter, not Tufnell. We've picked seamers ahead of Alex Tudor all year. We've had injuries before: we won the key Test last summer without Nasser. Michael Vaughan got himself a knock, Giles has been in and out with strains. And we won four series, and shared a fifth.

So why did we lose? Because, quite frankly, we gave up. Because we believed in the myth of the invincible Australians. Because wearing those three lions and the number that marks you down as one of a select club of 604 wasn't enough.

I'm not just hurt. I'm angry - angry because we threw it away. Despite all the arguments about poor selection and injuries, we are better than this. We've won from a Test down twice in the past year. We've chased seemingly impossible victory targets, we've toughed it out when the tail looked like it was about to collapse like a house of cards, for those few extra runs that made the difference between winning and losing. We've done it with players injured, done it with batsmen whose Test careers have been pronounced over more times than they've scored Test 100s. We've dug in for pride in lost rubbers, and won games the formbook says we never stood a chance of winning.

Some of the very players who've done these things played in these three Test matches. Every player in that group (barring the debutant Usman Afzaal) knows what an England victory feels like, and has tasted champagne won through sweat, bruises and dogged determination.

Yet we lost. It's too easy to blame the injuries, or to blame the selectors because we only had four alleged "Test class" players in the side. In truth, we were beaten before we even walked out at Edgbaston on the first day. Because we believed in the hype. We believed that the Aussies were that damn good. We didn't just get slaughtered. We let ourselves get slaughtered.

If winning was about individual skill, Gloucestershire would never win a thing, and Surrey would have done the one-day treble every year since 1996. Cricket is a team sport, and the real strength of the Australian side, complete with its two out of form batsmen, an overrated and uneconomical fast bowler and a leg-spinner who is by no means the force he was, is that they are a team - that they believe in themselves and each other. It's no good just copying their rituals: the cap numbers; the showing off the ball after a five-for. That doesn't make us a team. Sure, they're tools. But they're tools built on something that was already there: desire and self-belief.

We lost. And all Lord MacLaurin can say is that he is "disappointed but not that upset".

We were getting there. We crawled up from second from bottom of the Test table to third by, largely, sheer guts and determination. We acquired the taste for champagne; we formed a team spirit. We made England care about cricket again.

We won.

And then we threw it all away.

And he's just "disappointed."

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