Dec 24 (Reuters) - An Ashes tour that began with high hopes of taking home the urn has been reduced to a desperate effort to salvage some last vestiges of dignity as England head into one of the great occasions on the sporting calendar, the Boxing Day test.
The tourists have been savaged since meekly surrendering the series to a makeshift Australia outfit with a third straight defeat on Sunday in Adelaide, extending their winless streak in Australia to 18 tests going back to January 2011.
Post-mortems on preparations, squad selection, player behaviour and skill execution will undoubtedly come, but England still have two more dead rubber matches to negotiate before they are allowed to head home.
Team director Rob Key -- whose job, like those of coach Brendon McCullum and captain Ben Stokes, will be on the line if England succumb to a 5-0 whitewash -- reckons the tourists have been playing at around 20% of their skill level in Australia.
That leaves plenty of room for improvement at the Melbourne Cricket Ground from Friday, when the traditional festive crowd will go a long way to filling the cavernous home of Australian cricket.
Despite his concern at the mental health of his players amid media allegations of some excessive drinking during a break between the second and third tests, Stokes said his goal in Melbourne and Sydney was clear.
"This has not gone anywhere near to plan whatsoever (but) I'm very, very determined to go out and win the remaining two games," he told reporters at the MCG on Wednesday.
"When you know that you can look back on these first three games, and know that you haven't been able to sustain a quality of cricket for long enough, you are generally going to end up on the wrong side of the result.
"(But) I'm very determined to leave Australia with something positive to look back on."
Australia, meanwhile, have another handful of selection issues to settle with skipper Pat Cummins returning to rehabilitating his back now the series is settled, and spinner Nathan Lyon sidelined for a few months after hamstring surgery.
The home side have been dealing with such challenges since the start of the series, however, and will hardly see them as insurmountable given every selection gamble they have taken, or been forced into, has pretty much paid off.
The Australian players have been rejoicing in the triumph of "Ronball" - a jocular tribute to their phlegmatic coach Andrew McDonald and a parody of McCullum's "Bazball".
McDonald, in a very relaxed news conference on Tuesday, even briefly offered an opinion on how England had played in the series so far.
"We have been a little bit surprised at times," he said.
"The way that we had seen them play, to what they've delivered at certain times, has surprised us. We can hypothesize around that, but that's their problem, not ours."
(Reporting by Nick Mulvenney, editing by Peter Rutherford)
