Tours rarely come more calamitous than this. From first ball to last, England's 1990-91 Ashes campaign was an unmitigated disaster. Thrashed in the Tests and humiliated in the one-day series, England lurched from venue to venue seemingly in a trance, unable to comes to terms with the snarling competitiveness of an Australian side that, man for man, was not markedly superior to their own. A 3-0 drubbing set the tone for a success-starved decade, but it was the manner of England's defeats and the off-field shenanigans that accompanied them that really took the biscuit. England entered the series with genuine optimism. They had lost the Ashes in the farcical summer of 1989, but the team had since been resurrected under the captaincy of Graham Gooch, who had himself just completed the most immense summer of runscoring since Bradman's tour in 1930. Gooch's autocratic leadership style was not to everyone's taste, but the majority of the side that he took to Australia had fought tooth and nail for him in the Caribbean barely nine months earlier. Few could have expected such a turnaround in so short a space of time.

It has become a familiar refrain, but England did suffer more than their fair share of injuries. Angus Fraser sustained a hip injury at Melbourne that would keep him out of Test cricket for the best part of three years, and Allan Lamb tore a calf muscle while jogging. None, though, was more damaging than the poisoned hand that Gooch himself suffered in the early weeks of the tour. It was an injury so serious that he required an emergency operation, and without his grizzled guidance, England team batted, bowled, fielded, ran between the wickets and thought like a team of schoolchildren.

Lamb took over the captaincy for the first Test at Brisbane, a match England contrived to lose by ten wickets despite a healthy first-innings lead. Along with David Gower, Lamb was one of only two players in the squad with captaincy experience, but he and Gower nevertheless skulked off to a casino with Kerry Packer on the eve of the decisive third day. It was a crass error of judgment, compounded when Lamb, not out overnight, fell in the first over of the following morning. It was also an open invitation to anarchy, that culminated with Gower's Tiger Moth escapade in the state match against Queensland.

Gooch fought heroically against the tide, scoring 426 runs in his four Tests, but the rot had set in. England's fielding plumbed new depths, especially that of Phil Tufnell, whose personal cock-ups have made him to this day a cult anti-hero in Australia. Their discipline went up in smoke as well, with Tufnell, Alec Stewart and Eddie Hemmings all doing their bit to hasten the introduction of match referees. And as for the batting collapses …

England went 2-0 down at Melbourne after the most woeful slide of all. Again they had established a first-innings lead, and were cruising at 103 for 1 when Bruce Reid found his range and curtailed the innings for 150. Though they salvaged some pride at Sydney, where Mike Atherton scored the slowest century in Ashes history, and again at Adelaide, where Gooch's 87 and 117 came close to inspiring an unlikely win, they reverted to type in fine style in the final match at Perth.

Australia's victory was achieved despite low-key performances from their 1989 heroes. Mark Taylor, Dean Jones and Terry Alderman were all off the boil, while Steve Waugh was famously dropped at Adelaide in favour of his brother Mark, who scored one of the most enchanting debut centuries in history. It was a measure of England's disarray that the one player who could have graced the Australian side, Jack Russell, was sacrificed to make way for Stewart's superior batting. It would become a common feature of the decade.

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