With Australia going into the Ashes series against England on Thursday as overwhelming favourites, home captain Nasser Hussain will have isolated several key areas where his side must excel if they wish to compete.
If confidence alone decided sporting encounters, Australia should win 5-0. Sixteen test wins in a row confirmed their world supremacy, despite the ensuing glitch of a 2-1 series defeat in India. A comprehensive victory in the just-concluded one-day series against Pakistan and England -- who lost all six of their matches including being bowled out for 86 by the Australians -- will have strengthened Aussie self-belief. Captain Steve Waugh will doubtless translate that into some choice words to help accelerate his opponents' ''mental disintegration''. Hussain, relatively unscathed after missing the triangular one-day series, will prefer to forget the last few months -- which also included an England collapse to defeat against Pakistan in the second Test at Old Trafford.
Instead, he will hark back to the mental resilience that helped his side grind out laudable series wins in Sri Lanka and Pakistan around the turn of the year. In a sense, however, Hussain has been forced to concede ground to Waugh by not only acknowledging the Australians as the world's best but also by saying that he is as interested in how his injury-hit side competes as in the results.
If Australia's batting and bowling were not formidable enough, it is the way they dictate the pace of matches which makes them so dangerous.

They regularly score at between three and four an over, always giving their bowlers a chance to bowl out the opposition twice. In the first test in india in February, they scored 349 in 73.2 overs in the first innings. Bureau Report