Box clever and England can still win the Ashes - Gavin Hamilton

“I’m more than confident that England have got the right tools to win the Ashes,” said Hamilton, who played one Test for England and 50 white-ball internationals for his native Scotland.

“They’ve got everything they need to be successful out there.

“If everyone stays fit, or 95 per cent of the players stay fit, there’s no reason why they can’t come back and win well.

“They’ve taken a big hit in that first game, and I’m probably jumping on everyone else’s bandwagon when I say that it’s just about boxing that little bit cleverer around game situations and taking charge when you’re actually in control of games.

“I’m sure it’s been said a thousand times since that first Test, but it’s just about finding that right balance in how they go about things because it’s exciting to watch, the way they play, and you can't take that away.

“But, at some stage, there has to be a conversation, I think, where it’s ‘let’s just get the game situation, read it, read an hour’s worth of the game’, and that can change the whole outlook of the five days, effectively.

“I get the feeling that it’s just been one way, very singular in the way they go about it, which has brought a lot of success, I get that.

“But I think Australia is a different beast, and I think everybody in and around cricket, who knows anything about cricket, knows that you’re not just going to batter your way to winning Test matches over there, especially when we only play there once every three, four years.

“So, it’s just a little bit of fine-tuning, a little bit more thought, potentially, because it’s a fine balance between that natural instinct they’ve all got ingrained at the moment to finding ways of winning games, I guess.”

Hamilton, 51, whose professional career ran from 1993 to 2010, sympathises with those former players who were concerned about England’s preparation heading into the series.

Ben Stokes, the England captain, referred to them as “has-beens” – terminology that he perhaps regrets – after justified comments by such as Michael Vaughan and Graham Gooch.

England played only one warm-up game - against their own Lions’ second string - prior to Perth and have passed up the chance to send any of their beaten side to play a Prime Minister’s XI in Canberra this weekend.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of that strategy, Hamilton would have liked to have seen more match-time, too.

“You’re just fine-tuning going into a Test match, but you’ve got to play in conditions and get as much time as you can to acclimatise,” he said.

“I did a speech the other day where I was talking about the South Africa tour (in 1999-2000), which I don’t talk about much (Hamilton made his sole Test appearance in the innings defeat in the first Test in Johannesburg).

“It reminded me that we played three first-class games and two one-day games ahead of the Test match. We were there for five, six weeks ahead of the first Test.

“I appreciate times are different, there's no doubt about that, and I appreciate that science and medicine plays a big part in this around not playing too much cricket and overworking people and bowling too much, and so on.

“The last thing I’ll do is the kind of ‘in my day’ stuff, but you did get conditioned-fit, overseas-fit, whatever you want to call it, and your body found a way.

“That’s the only way, in my opinion, that you can hit the ground running, and I know that's very old-school, but those are my thoughts.

“You need at least one, maybe two first-class games - not practice matches where there isn’t any pressure.

“There's no media speculation. There's no questioning about your position because they probably know their places already, so you’re not working towards being picked out of the squad as such.

“All these little things can help going into that first Test, so you go in without any doubts whatsoever that you’re ready to go.”

Attention now turns to the second Test in Brisbane, starting on Thursday.

The day/night game will be played with a pink ball under lights and Australia will once more be without their injured captain Pat Cummins and fellow pace bowler Josh Hazlewood.

“Look, this is huge,” said Hamilton.

“England have just got to come back hard and re-think a couple of game situations.

“Like I said, there's absolutely no reason why they can’t hit back.

"Especially with Cummins out - he's a massive, massive loss. He's huge, and obviously Hazlewood, too.

“They’re in, dare I say, a vulnerable situation, Australia.

"They're not anywhere near at full strength.

“All their batters are coming off that Test match with very few runs apart from Travis Head, so they're all fighting to find their form.

“We just need to get there first, that's the key.

"We need to shake it off as best we can, which I definitely think this team can do, just shake it off and come back really hard but think things through a bit more.”

Hamilton continued: “When I say that everyone just needs to box clever, I mean that you don’t want everybody playing the same way.

“If you’ve got players who can have a dip, that’s fine, but you need three or four players that don’t, I think.

"You need three or four players that can balance it out.

“England have got players who can take games away from teams in a session, so there is definitely a place for it, don’t get me wrong, absolutely there is.

“I just don’t think we can have the top-seven all doing the same thing, so it’s just understanding those game situations and how, if you bat for another hour, or whatever, that can affect and benefit the side over the period of a Test match.”