Graphic: the Battle for the Ashes

For the past year, arriving at a view of the strength of the Australia cricket team has been a little like fathoming the true seriousness of the global financial crisis. Was this recession or depression? Was one observing shoots of promise or the bouncing of various dead cats?

Even now, it's tempting to extrapolate from single events: a scarcity of runs here, an excess of no-balls there, the observable reality that the best Australian bowler of the World Twenty20 was Dirk Nannes, of the Netherlands. But this is a long tour - by far the longest these days, during which sustained effort and consistency will count.

The journey will be shadowed everywhere by recollections of 2005, with a concomitant search for omens and auspices. Already, however, it presents the clearest possible contrast.

Four years ago, Ricky Ponting brought a team of the talents, eight of its members touring for the third time, Shane Warne for the fourth. Played on an Xbox, the series would have been an Australia whitewash.

If Brett Lee fails to make the cut in Cardiff on Wednesday, by comparison, the members of the Australia attack will not have a Test in England between them, while only the captain can boast a Test century on English soil. As Neil Harvey told Ian Chappell after helping to select the touring party of 1972, this is a “team of goers”, an investment in attitudes rather than accomplishments.

In one respect, too, this Australia team are almost bound to acquit themselves better than their predecessors; they will be more harmonious. For as the core of Australian champions has disbanded over the past four years, it has emerged just how discontented and disunited was their XI's 2005 incarnation. In his uncommonly candid autobiography, True Colours, Adam Gilchrist has described how adversity quickly plunged the Australians into recriminations, particularly against John Buchanan, their coach at the time. “Everyone seemed agitated and anxious, and not responding to each other. No one was responding to any of the efforts Buck was putting in. In fact, there was coffee-table talk from guys becoming disillusioned with him, saying he wasn't providing the service they wanted from a coach. They were saying his ideas had grown stale. He loved meetings, and guys were grumbling, 'Why do we need more meetings?' ”

Buchanan, meanwhile, has offered a mea non culpa in his manual cum memoir, If Better is Possible, saying how he left most of the quotidian coaching duties to Jamie Siddons, his assistant, “so I could spend more time being strategic ... finding tasks and experiences to expand the horizons of the players”. With strategy to burn, but no tactics to speak of, Australia barely won a session after the first Test at Lord's. No wonder there was muffled laughter in Australian circles when Buchanan accepted the ECB shilling this summer.

Gilchrist also describes how “personality clashes had disrupted relations between the wives and partners”, reporting: “A guy would go to dinner with his partner and hear bad things about someone else's partner; you could be sure that the same was happening somewhere else in reverse.” Coaching chaos; WAG wars - no wonder they were calling cricket the new football four years ago. This time it will be different, and not simply because Buchanan's successor, Tim Nielsen, has more invested in lateral movement than lateral thinking.

In the antipodean summer at home, Australia twice surrendered winning positions to a South Africa team who played them on their abilities, not their reputations. There were scattergun selections and peculiar perseverances, especially involving Matthew Hayden, whose failures accumulated like unshriven sins, and Andrew Symonds, who kept gazing at his bat as though willing it to turn into a fishing rod.

Yet once the team were on the road in the return series, the esprit de corps was palpable. On flat pitches, South Africa would probably have prevailed again. But unexpectedly spicy surfaces emboldened Mitchell Johnson, Peter Siddle and Ben Hilfenhaus, and some none-too-brainy bowling then let fresh-faced Phillip Hughes loose.

There were valuable efforts from new caps Marcus North and Andrew McDonald, and Ponting suddenly had a new lease on life, speaking of an “exciting time in my career”.

For while a tour can be isolating, repetitive, it can also focus minds and encourage mutual reliance. Young Australians are noted for being eager travellers and this team resembled a bunch of students in a gap year bent on savouring everything their journey had to offer. It was as impressive a bounceback as Australia's legendary World Cup campaign ten years ago.

To refresh my memory of Ashes past before leaving Australia, I re-read the cycle of tour diaries that Steve Waugh commenced in 1993. Inevitably, they recall Edna St Vincent Millay's line about life: not so much one damn thing after another as the same damn thing over and over. Yet they also show Australia teams of his era bent not only on winning but on enjoying one another's company. There are lots of running gags, silly pranks, communal activities, cheerful rivalries, plus a bemusement among the Australians that their English counterparts demonstrate no such predisposition. By 2005, as Gilchrist would lament, the roles had been reversed: “We didn't have to look far... to see an example of a team cohering as a team: we were playing against them.”

So while most of what is written about this Ashes will concern specific contests and particular skills - Hughes's strokes versus Anderson's swing, Pietersen's power versus Johnson's pace - don't underestimate the aspects to which no outside observer is privy; such intangibles as togetherness, morale, individual ambition and collective pride. If the times are more austere, the Australians already have experience of fashioning their own stimulus packages.

Gideon Haigh is Australia's leading cricket writer and the author of numerous books, including Mystery Spinner: The Story of Jack Iverson. He will be writing regularly in The Times throughout the Ashes.