Former England captain David Gower explains how England's Ashes demise has been so sudden Jimmy Bairstow and Alastair Cook after Cook dropped David Warner. DAVID Gower says England's ongoing Ashes demise is a culmination of a "perfect storm" as Australia's confidence soars. As the former captain watched his team meekly succumb to its fourth successive loss on Sunday, he said the team had simply never recovered from the first two days of the series in Brisbane. Australia had been 6-132 after batting at the Gabba, yet after a string of extraordinary events, found itself 224 runs up with 10 second-innings wickets in hand by stumps on day two. "The end of the first day and again on the second day, events like that breed confidence," said Gower, who said England's repeated batting collapses had been costly and "inexplicable." The moment you believe that what you've been talking about is actually going to happen, that's the moment you gain the ability to make it happen more often. Australia suddenly believed it could win - and that has made all the difference. Gower, who played 117 Tests for England, said those events "set in train a perfect storm, where anything that can go wrong, has done so." There's been a collective loss of confidence. There are people you'd expect to bat well in these conditions just haven't made the runs you'd expect, starting with Alastair Cook ... and even those who have been in good touch. For instance, Ian Bell, when he's made runs has looked in really good touch and played absolutely beautifully; Kevin Pietersen has looked as though he's been in good form - he's done one or two stupid things, admittedly - but by and large been in good form, too. Then you suddenly look down these scorecards and instead of one or two of them getting 150 now and again to keep the contest even, we're talking half-centuries at best. And we all know that if you don't put runs on the board, at any level of cricket, you're likely to come second. Gower denied there'd been a lack of "fight" in the England camp, but rather a sense of inevitability at the momentum Australia has generated. Losing Jonathan Trott after one Test match, but effectively before it all began, is one, then you have Joe Root going up and down the order and suddenty you've got destabilising factors. And that little bit of destabilisation - it only has to be a 2-3 per cent change - starts to affect the confidence to put plans into action. There's a state of flux now in this England team which has accelerated. You always expect a team to have to evolve, but you'd like to be able to control the pace of that evolution, bringing people in at good times, so you can keep the spirit and effectiveness high. But when you've got the experienced blokes not producing results and younger players coming in - the irony being that (Ben) Stokes is the only player to make a hundred this series - in just his second match at the time. If he was doing that on the back of Bell, Pietersen and Cook making runs, then so much the better. But it's been a lone hand. (Dumped keeper Matt) Prior said after Perth we're running third in a two-horse race and that's how it feels. Having said that, you can't go for wholesale change, because that never works. You can't suddenly throw everyone out and start again, or rip up the blueprints because there are a lot of good players there, still. I think you just have to draw a thick black line under the series, come back after this snuffing and say as individuals and as a team, we just need to regroup and make it work. To come up with a rationale as to why it's impossible to stop (Austraila's) momentum is not necessarily that easy. But things like the collapses ... ever since that first Test match, we've had four or five really bad collapses. That happens once in a blue moon normally, so it is completely bizarre and I don't know how you explain it. Once your confidence diminishes, you're in trouble. If you have one bad day, or even a bad session, you can say OK, that's a bad one, and then you get back to normal. When you look back at the (northern) summer, when England had a bad session, they were pretty good at finding solutions. Here, they've run out of ideas, seemingly.