In 1492, Boabdil, the 22nd and last Emir of Granada, surrendered the city to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, completing the latter duo's ambition of reconquering all of Spain, ending the seven centuries of Arab presence. After Boabdil handed over the keys of the Alhambra fortress and left the city for the last time, he turned to look at the jewel of Moorish Spain and burst into tears. His mother - tough old lady, this - saw him and said, "You! Do not weep like a woman for what you could not hold as a man."

Stripped of its gender stereotyping, that's how I feel about the lost Ashes, or more correctly the lost ability to regain the Ashes. We cannot weep for what we were not man enough, in the cricketing sense, to achieve.

I've gone through all of the stages of grief since Boxing Day, but have come out the other side and realised that this was the only way it could end - because England is a much, much better side than we are.

Their bowlers constantly attack, making our batsmen play, inducing huge uncertainty in them, gaining devastating late movement and holding their catches, culminating in the Great Boxing Day Lemming Rush. By then our batsmen were mentally shot, strangled by the constant pressure into going hard at the moving ball, consoling themselves that they were trying to be positive but in reality flailing desperately to get off strike.

The English batsmen played aggressively from the moment they arrived at the crease, with partnerships motoring to 50 in the blink of an eye and then growing as they murdered poor bowling.

In stark, crystal-clear contrast, the Australian bowling was mostly rubbish. The bowlers hit their straps in Perth and everybody raved at the miracle comeback, this was the real Australia, look out England. In reality it was an aberration, just like Headingley in 2009. The standard fare was gunbarrel-straight and sliding onto the pads far too often. What swing we could generate was predictable out of the hand, not lethally late like the English version. Apart from that amazing purple patch in Perth, Johnson was abysmally bad. Can he be carried for 18 months in between these moments of inspiration? What about the Tests lost in the meantime as he sprays it like a belt-fed M16 on a defensive fire pattern, leaking runs at an unbelievable rate?

Hilfenhaus could hardly deviate the ball. Why not? Siddle was a brave trier and deserved his wickets, but also went wicketless and inspirationless for long periods. (At least, on his own MCG, Siddle was determined to go down fighting with both bat and ball, and not embarrass himself in front of his home crowd.) Harris, like Johnson, was dangerous in one purple patch and hopeless cannon-fodder the rest of the time: he can't bowl to a plan because he does not know where the ball is going to go. Our supposed wicket-taker, Bollinger, was not fit and it showed. Watson just ambled up and put up balls that did nothing except say "hit me." The innocuity and pedestrian-ness of our attack was mystifying. I will come to the spin situation later.

In hindsight, the signs should have been there. I look back on the way that Strauss and Cook counter-attacked in Brisbane in the second innings, starting 221 runs behind and putting on 188 before Trott joined Cook for the really ominous partnership. All of a sudden the Australian attack was utterly toothless, and worse, the English knew it. The positive intent shown by the English, combined with the totally unarmed nature of our attack on a benign pitch, put Australia well into debit, although the score remained 0-0.

Who knows what crisis meetings took place in the Australian camp at that point, whatever they were saying publicly, because that 1-517 (dec) was a catastrophe from the bowling point of view. There was no danger in the attack at all, no pressure on the English batsmen to play the ball on the bowler's terms, no threat, and listless fielding to boot. In hindsight the red lights were flashing and a big "aroo-gah, aroo-gah" alarm was blaring. It was put down to the placid track, and we took the positives from the Siddle hat-trick and the wonderful Hussey-Haddin partnership and convinced ourselves that we were on equal terms with the English.

We were not. We never were.

In the blink of an eye we were 3 for 2 in Adelaide, after some inexplicably poor running from Watson and Katich and the immediate targeting by the English of that point of duress that killed our campaign: the ball that has to be played, but moves late. At 3 for 2 your heart was saying, "it's a shocking start, but we bat deep," when your head was saying "it's going to be hard to get back into this game from here." In hindsight this was a killer blow, because we had an already jumpy line-up in action and exposed far too soon for its liking, with Hussey finding himself acting as both lunch-watchman and North-watchman. England batting by the end of that first day in Adelaide was another sign. It simply should not happen in Test Cricket.

I texted to some friends on that Friday afternoon: "Two runouts on the first day! I guarantee that Harry's Under-14s tonight, most of whom can barely run in their pads, will not have two runouts!" They did not.

Then, of course, there came the murder. 5 declared for 620. Suddenly the awful truth loomed: with this popgun attack, bowling with no threat whatsoever to batsmen in this kind of mood, we were not going to take ten wickets, let alone 20. Again, the English partnerships were 50 before you knew it. Whereas they had bowled to commit batsmen to a change of weight between feet and trusted in that diabolical late swing to do its deadly business, we put two people out for the hook and tried to bounce English batsmen out. We were like the Persians quailing before "Greek fire" or the French knights arrogantly riding up to within range of the English longbows: they had a weapon we not only did not have, we did not even understand how it had been developed, and we were powerless against it.

Then came Perth, where yet another sub-standard effort batting first was rescued by the Johnson miracle, and we dared to hope that we had turned it around. Until a coin was tossed in Melbourne, and the cracks that had been papered over in the dead of night so often broke open to reveal an edifice that was rotten. All the English did was finally condemn it.

The 10 wickets lost to catches behind the wicket, the top order so bereft of confidence that kamikaze batting with no sense of when to leave a ball, was hard enough to take. What was too much to take - the last shattering of pretensions - was the body language of our bowlers once the pitch had been rolled and the creases repainted before tea on Boxing Day. The sun was out, the gloomy conditions in which England's now-standard late movement had so tormented the Australians were gone, and our guys said with the cast of their shoulders: "they'll make 500, we're doomed to run up and throw pies at them for two-and-a-half days."

Gone was the ability of the ball to sear in on a length, and both bounce and nip decisively. Gone was any semblance of threat from the track. In 10 minutes the minefield had been replaced by a road - no, a freeway. We seemed to be using a different ball on a different pitch.

Could you watch anymore? I could not.

So, where to from here?

What I don't understand is how the entire structure of Australian cricket appears to have lost the ability to swing the ball, and to bat with an innings built on the basics (with the honourable exception of Hussey.) The main problem with Hughes, for example, is not the jumpiness at the crease under short-length attack, nor is it the instant focus on getting into position without moving his back foot to prepare to slash outside offstump, it's his inability to defend straight without trying to play across the line. Smith is the same: to think that we have two members of our top six with such flaky techniques - it is simply not sustainable at this level.

I feel sorry for Ponting: he got himself into the physical shape of his life for this series, but he has been worked out and over by the English, who know that his habit of walking through his drives early makes him vulnerable. I don't agree that his reflexes are gone - a lesser batsmen would have missed the Tremlett pearler that removed him on Boxing Day - but the susceptibility to late movement, and gifting his wicket twice down the legside, have made it a dreadful series for the captain.

Clarke is another who has had a shocker, with his one major contribution undone by his appalling habit of being dismissed in the last over of a session. It has happened to Clarke too often to be coincidence. It might only be a minute lessening of concentration, but it has had awful consequences far too many times now. Clarke is another that has been well and truly shell-shocked by the lethality of the English on and outside his offstump - and his angled bat is about the worst way he can try to counter it.

Watson has done well, but to say that he needed to go on with it a couple of times is stating the obvious. It is harsh, but some of the times he went out, the context of the game was such that his half-century may as well have been a duck. And his casual calling - especially in the second innings in Melbourne, which did for Hughes - was just another sign of how mentally oppressed our batsmen were by the end. If even Hussey, whose superhuman efforts had kept us in the series longer than we deserved to be, was a beaten man by Melbourne, it shows you how effective the English bowlers had been.

The great irony is that the English bowlers were so effective because the Australians quite simply do not face their like away from the Tests. The only way the Australian batsmen could have prepared for the Melbourne Test would have been to ask Tremlett and Anderson and Bresnan to bowl at them in the nets. We simply do not have bowlers in this country, it seems, who can command the kind of late movement and consistently threatening line and length that is second nature to the English attack. To see Bresnan come in at Melbourne and instantly have control of his team's modus operandi, moving it late both ways, was heartbreaking. Why the hell can't we do it?

That's for the likes of Tim Neilsen, Troy Cooley and Greg Chappell to work out. Is there anyone in Sheffield Shield cricket who can do it? By the time we get to England in 2013 we need to have found them.

The selectors have got to bear some responsibility. That Hauritz was considered unlikely to threaten England was a brave call on Ashes eve. Xavier Doherty was thrown to the wolves: he did not bowl well, but he never had the chance to attack, never had runs in the bank and was always bowling to batsmen that his pace compatriots had ensured were well-set. Steven Smith was shown to be a long way short of Test standard as a spinner and of course Michael Beer was a non-presence. Is effective spin bowling gone from the Australian repertoire? Let's see Steven O'Keefe, let's see John Holland, let's try some others. We simply have to find a wicket-taking spinner.

I want to see some changes. I want to see Andrew McDonald, when fit, given another chance for the control of one end he brings. I want to see the likes of Trent Copeland, Mark Cameron, Mitchell Starc, Chris Swan, Josh Hazlewood, James Pattinson, Peter George tried. We must accept that Mitchell Johnson, Ben Hilfenhaus and Ryan Harris are not the answer.

I want to see Usman Khawaja or Callum Ferguson or George Bailey given a chance at Test Cricket. I believe Tim Paine, if fully fit, should take over from Brad Haddin behind the stumps. If not McDonald, I would like to see Tasmania's Luke Butterworth tried as the all-rounder: he seems consistently able to make clutch runs and take clutch wickets, which is a skill our Test team badly lacks. I would like to see Ricky Ponting stay on as captain but bow to the inevitable and move down the order.

It has been a truly devastating four weeks of Ashes cricket, but we can't weep. They turned up with a plan and executed it very well, helped on the batting front by the fact that we were maddeningly, inexplicably bad. We were nowhere near good enough, committed enough, proud enough or tough enough. We were gutless with the bat, toothless with the ball and clueless in the field. The only consolation is that truly, the only way we can go from here is up. Because this is rock-bottom, 273 degrees Kelvin, our performance in Melbourne was as bad as I ever want to see an Australian team play again.