A veteran Fleet Street journalist recently told me how he had been sacked as a pundit on a boxing show because, in the words of the show’s producer, he was “too old school”.

Old school in that he told it like it was rather than indulging in doublespeak and puffing up ordinary fighters to be better than he knew them to be.

This wilful disregard for the facts permeates the coverage of English sport, as anyone who has followed the career of Tim Henman will attest to.

And the same people who told us England’s “Golden Generation” was going to win the football World Cup were keen to peddle us the far-fetched line that Andrew Flintoff and Co were going to compete with Australia on their home patch.

Never mind that England thought the right way to prepare for the most eagerly-anticipated series of all time was with a couple of hit-and-giggle warm-up games.

Never mind that they were missing arguably their best fast bowler in Simon Jones and that Steve Harmison has managed a handful of world-class spells in the past two years.

No matter that Matthew Hoggard, despite his seven-for at Adelaide, is primarily an ‘English’ bowler and not suited to Australian tracks or that Flintoff has a gammy ankle and is clearly unable to bowl at full tilt.

Ignore the fact that the England skipper came into the series woefully undercooked with the bat, meaning that, with the hapless Geraint Jones coming in after him, England’s tail has effectively been starting at six.

Then there’s poor old Monty Panesar, a very good left-arm spinner invested with mystical powers by the nation’s press, many of whom conveniently forgot that finger spinners never take too many wickets Down Under.

In truth, England began loosening their grip on the Ashes urn, and perhaps reality, when they allowed themselves to be sucked into the orgy of overblown celebration that followed their 2005 Ashes success.

They had, lest we forget, won one series, and while England’s players indulged themselves, Australia began cutting away the dead wood and planning for revenge.

Out went Simon Katich and in came Michael Hussey, a man who averaged more than 70 in 11 Tests coming into this series and takes a water cannon to shift.

And out went Jason Gillespie, replaced by Stuart Clark, “a poor man’s Glenn McGrath” who took 16 wickets at a little over 17 in the recent series in South Africa.

It’s a bitter truth for many fans to swallow, but Australia will beat England nine series out of 10, which is exactly what they have done over the past 20 years, because they almost always have better players.

Blaming Ashley Giles and Duncan Fletcher for the ills of English cricket only masks a depressing reality, namely that English cricket has been consistently mediocre for the last 50 years.

Remember those English greats Botham, Gooch, Gower and Gatting? So do I, because they used to get flogged every other year by the West Indies in the 1980s.

And just as England trod water then and waited for the West Indies to fade, so they are doing again - waiting, waiting for the mighty pillars of Australia’s empire, their “Dad’s Army”, the Warnes, the McGraths, the Gilchrists, to crumble rather than setting about the task of building an empire of their own.

We are talking about an English system that hasn’t produced a consistently great bowler, pace or spin, in more than 25 years.

The English system has produced fewer top-class batsmen in the last quarter of a century than Australia have in their current line-up.

Australia were mediocre once – even England used to beat them - and they decided to do something about it.

While members of the English media, the BBC included, and many England fans continue to blame everything on Giles, Jones and Fletcher, so they ignore the deep-rooted problems in our game.

Just as those who told us that Sven-Goran Eriksson squandered our “Golden Generation” in Germany ignored the fact that, sorry to say, England’s footballers were similarly second-rate.