KEY POINTS:
Glenn McGrath will not admit it - champion sportsmen rarely do - but his time is nearly up. Saying this brings no pleasure at all, because for the past decade he has been the best fast bowler in the world and it has been thoroughly enjoyable watching him perform.
Yes, when I was playing for England he made my life a misery, and you had to admire the way he went about his business. He remains a fit, relentless and ruthless competitor with a heart the size of a watermelon, but there is now something missing, that little something that separated him from the rest.
Even in Brisbane, where he bowled beautifully and took 7 for 103 in Australia's crushing victory, the warning signs were there.
With the new ball he looked much the same as ever, but once it lost its hardness there were spells where he seemed almost innocuous.
The turgid pitch has done little to help his cause, yet the nagging feeling remains that the young McGrath would have found a way to mount a threat.
The 36-year-old will still be a handful on a surface that has something in it, but on flat pitches he no longer possesses the spite, the nip, that zip which made him the complete fast bowler. And they are not going to come back, no matter how vigorously McGrath trains or how hard he tries.
Sadly, after years of punishing physical work, the body of a fast bowler reaches a stage where it no longer does what the owner wants, or what it once could do.
When the nip goes, the pacemen struggle to force the pace.
Ricky Ponting, the Australia captain, has clearly recognised this and, judging by the way in which he treated him on Saturday, so has Kevin Pietersen. Ponting has used McGrath like a first- change bowler.
Brett Lee and Stuart Clark took the second new ball and they have both tried to attack the batsman.
McGrath, in marked contrast, has hung the ball outside off-stump, waiting for the batsman to get bored and make a mistake.
Pietersen realised early on that this was a pitch on which he could dominate McGrath. He drove him on the up; he shimmied down the pitch and flicked him through the leg side; he pulled him off a length.
He did all this safe in the knowledge that McGrath had nothing more to throw back at him. It was ruthless stuff as Pietersen tried to finish off a once-great bowler.
McGrath's decline leaves Australia needing to find someone to lead their attack, but the big question is whether any of his fellow pacemen hold the right credentials. It is some job. You set the tone at the start of each session or day, you bowl the crucial overs and you stand out as a beacon of reliability.
Stephen Harmison has been unable to cope with the role, and neither can Lee.
There are few better sights in cricket than Lee in full flight. He has the lot - the good looks, the panache and the athleticism that us journeymen would die for. He is fast, and he can swing the ball too. But his wickets are costing him 32 runs apiece and he is conceding more than three and a half runs an over.
That's not good enough. He needs to start bowling with greater consistency, skill and nous if he is to hold on to his place, let alone fill the void left by McGrath, and eventually Warne.
Lee's test career started with a flurry of wickets - 42 in seven matches at a cost of just 16 runs each. But in the following 49 tests he has taken only four five-wicket hauls. He may still look a champion, but at 30 he is no longer a youngster.
In the opening two Ashes tests Clark has been what McGrath used to be. He has bowled an immaculate line, hit the pitch hard and shaped the ball ever so slightly away from a right-handed batsman. There is no fuss; he just runs in and does the job. He has the little bit of snap that McGrath is now so painfully missing.
Clark's test career - 31 wickets at under 20 in six matches - is off to an excellent start and he has the potential to lead an attack. But he is 31 and probably has only two or three good years left in him. Shane Watson, Shaun Tait and Mitchell Johnson are three for the future, but they're raw.
Injury has troubled each, and Australia need them to remain fit. They may be required sooner than they think.
- INDEPENDENT
