MATT PRIOR: This England workforce hasn’t been up for the battle – if my aspect had obtained out enjoying these photographs there would’ve been an offended line ready for us within the dressing room

It pains Matt Prior to say it, but say it he does. On the morning after the day-night before, England’s former wicketkeeper, who had a ringside seat at the Gabba as a pundit for TNT, is ticking about the performance that left Ben Stokes’s side two down with three to play.

‘I feel like these guys have almost taken the mickey out of Ben and Baz (McCullum),’ he says. ‘The captain and coach must be thinking, “Hold on, we’ve put our careers on the line for you. What are we getting back? Now is the time you repay us for that faith”.’

Sitting in the corner of the empty dining area at his hotel in Brisbane’s well-heeled Kangaroo Point, and only occasionally pausing to sip his flat white, Prior is fulminating righteously and eloquently about an England team he fears are not up for the battle. 

And whatever the micro-criticisms of driving on the up or bowling the wrong length, he regards their lack of fighting spirit as the biggest crime of all.

‘Having been at the ground and watched training, then seen the match, you’ve basically got two guys here ready for a fight, and that’s Stokes and Root,’ he tells Daily Mail Sport. ‘I was watching them in the field, on those hot days in the middle of the Test. Who were the guys hustling around?

‘You can drop catches: I dropped many. You can bowl badly. You can nick off. But the effort and energy you put in around the field, the intensity you try and create as a group… When you’re hunting Australian batsmen, there’s got to be 11 of you out there, and it’s got to be not for 10 or 15 minutes: it’s every minute of the day, every day.’

Prior, now 43, is a product of the Andy Flower school of hard knocks, a veteran of 79 Tests who won in Australia, won in India, and averaged 40 while acting as what he calls ‘the drummer of the band’ behind the stumps. And he was appalled by what he witnessed.

It reminds him of the time Flower walked into England’s dressing room on a tour of Bangladesh. The players had been ‘whingeing’, and Flower got stuck in: ‘If you don’t want to be here, put your hand up right now and I will book you a flight home. You can be out of here this evening, because there are a whole load of people in England who would give their right leg to be sat in this dressing room.’

Only two games into a five-match series, Prior believes the time has come for Stokes and McCullum to have a similar chat with their charges. ‘The first thing is to find out who doesn’t want to be here,’ he says. ‘We can’t have passengers.’

His criticism stems from concern. It is heartfelt but constructive, and it is delivered with such articulate intensity that you wonder whether he might be a natural as the ECB’s managing director, should the job become available.

Take Jamie Smith, the England wicketkeeper who endured a miserable time at the Gabba with both bat and gloves. Prior watched him closely, then sought out the former Australia keeper Ian Healy in the media centre for a ‘sense check’.

He explains: ‘The first thing Healy said to me was: “I like how he catches the ball.” Second thing: “I need more from him.” The wicketkeeper is the drummer of the band, the heartbeat of the team. He might be a quiet and introverted guy, but that’s OK: you don’t have to shout and sledge.

‘But you do have to appeal when there’s a half-chance. You have to get up to the stumps every single ball. And if a fielder chooses not to throw it to you, you have to scream for it.

‘When we won here in 2010-11, I made a decision to be at the stumps every single ball. I told the fielders: “When that ball comes to you, pick it up at a rate of knots, chuck it into me, preferably as close to the batsman’s head as possible, and I will be there.”’

Prior is a fan of what McCullum and Stokes have tried to achieve over the past three-and-a-half years, and he doesn’t buy the argument that events at Perth and Brisbane have signalled the death of Bazball.

Instead, he believes it’s time for the coach and captain to demand a return on their investment, particularly from Ollie Pope and Zak Crawley.

‘I mean, Pope’s played 60-odd Test matches,’ he says. ‘He’s not a youngster any more. Time to really step up. And how many chances has Zak Crawley had? He’s averaging 31.

‘This is the moment. The time has come. For years, McCullum and Stokes have stood by these guys. Every time Crawley nicks off, they go: “He’s our guy. We’ll back him.” This needs to be repaid.’

‘Now’s the time for Stokes to call in his chips, and say: “Zak, you can’t walk out there, nick it to slip, and walk off. I need you to make better decisions. Ollie, I need you at three, and I need you to go out there and fight.”

‘Jeez, if we got out like some of those dismissals at the Gabba, we had Flower and Graham Gooch waiting at the door, let alone Stuart Broad, Jimmy Anderson, Graeme Swann and everyone else. Chipping the ball back, one after the other, to Michael Neser bowling 80mph, with the keeper up? They’d have been like: “What are you doing?”‘

Then there’s Harry Brook, and here Prior’s critique takes a different tack. ‘He’s the best young batsman I’ve ever seen play for England,’ he says. ‘That includes Root, Kevin Pietersen, Ian Bell.

‘And that’s why it’s so frustrating when he tries to play ramp shots in a key moment of the game. You’re better than that. You don’t need to take the risk. That’s an ego play for me.’

Prior believes Stokes was right to remind his team that ‘Australia is no place for weak men’, and was struck by what happened moments after Steve Smith pulled Gus Atkinson for six to seal Australia’s 2–0 lead.

‘I watched Stokes walking off the pitch, and he was about 20 yards in front of the rest of the team. He was fuming.

‘When he came over to talk to me and Steven Finn (on TNT), he was brilliant. I wanted to get my kit on. I’m like, “Mate, I’m with you. I’ll go out there with you”.’

And this is Prior’s take on McCullum’s claim that England ‘over-trained’ before the second Test: ‘That’s him saying I don’t care what the Press think. You’re not going to bully me. He wound the whole country up, so whether that was a good call or not, I don’t know.

‘But he said it to take all the focus off the players, and give them a few days of not copping it. It’s a Jose Mourinho move, right?’

On one level, Prior is sympathetic. ‘The game has changed immeasurably. There’s more money around, and that’s awesome. But if you’re a young cricketer now, you can go off and play a few weeks of Twenty20: pingo, pango, pongo.

‘And then you’ve got to turn up at the Gabba, in 30°C heat, 40,000 Aussies baying for English blood, and you’ve got to dig in and choose attrition and run in and bowl hard on a flat surface for days.

‘These guys wouldn’t be blamed for thinking: “What am I doing, do I actually want this?”‘

But he wants to help, and it seems a pity he wasn’t enlisted by the management to have a word with Jamie Smith.

‘There aren’t many bigger fans than me of Stokes, Root, McCullum, England cricket, of wanting to beat the Aussies,’ he says. ‘And if ever I was asked, I would absolutely love to do it, but also be completely honoured and give it the respect it deserves.

‘I look at Jamie Smith. I was there: I was that guy with the gloves, wearing an England shirt and having just dropped a catch, and they’re all coming at you. It’s hard. And if I can help in any little way to make his life easier, then I’m here for it.’

Prior’s brief stint on the ground with TNT went down a storm on social media, precisely because of his refusal to mince words. If English cricket feels it’s ready for some hard truths, they should drop him a line, and never mind if the coffee goes cold.