The Ashes 2013-14: England captain Alastair Cook must prove he can answer critics in third Test in Australia As missions go it is one for 007 though in his absence Alastair Cook, playing his 100th Test, a feat Michael Clarke also celebrates, will lead England in a must-win game. There is a theory doing the rounds in the Australian media that Cook has lead a life of seamless upward motion and that this is his first real setback and he does not know how to respond. As a captain they may have a point, though he has only been in the job 14 months, but as a player he was within one Test of being dropped in 2010, a crisis he staved off with a hundred. With England woefully short of runs, having been dismissed for fewer than 200 in three of their four innings, a similar response from him would be most welcome. Yet, with Cook admitting he and the others have been guilty of poor shot selection, how do you suddenly make the right choices when you have just three days between the matches, and Johnson's pace means there is just a fraction of a second between making the right and wrong decision? "It's tough," Cook said. We have fallen into traps we shouldn't have fallen into and our shot selection has let us down at times. But you can practise it by treating every ball in the nets as if it was in the middle and be strong on ourselves when doing that. The unique characteristics of the Waca, with its extra pace and carry, would make captains consider playing certain bowlers, but Cook is adamant that his batsmen must learn to adapt. As a result, you sense not much will change in the batting order unless Gary Ballance, who made 89 for the England Performance Programme in Perth yesterday, is brought in to bolster it. Ballance is competing for a place with Jonny Bairstow, who failed to get a bat in the EPP game after Sam Robson, Middlesex's Australian-born opener, scored a hundred and the visitors declared. Yet Balance is perceived to have a weakness against short-pitched bowling and England's coaching staff have been working hard on it all tour. A batting line-up with either of them at six, with Matt Prior seven and Ben Stokes at eight, has a more robust look to it, but you sense England also want to play either Tim Bresnan or one of the tall men, Boyd Rankin or Chris Tremlett, the latter having taken eight wickets here three years ago. Bresnan is the kind of tough, no-nonsense cricketer Cook would have wanted in the last Test but for the dry pitch tempting him into playing two spinners. But to get him and Stokes into the side, or him and one of the two tall men, will mean dropping both frontline spinners from Adelaide, Graeme Swann and Monty Panesar. That would leave Joe Root to do the spinning, something Darren Lehmann feels is risky when temperatures of 100F have been forecast for the first three days of the match. For that reason, as well as a nod to a bowling attack working well at present, he has already said that he favours playing Nathan Lyon. The heat will open up the cracks wider and more quickly than normal, inevitable for a pitch with such high clay content, though the fissures rarely benefit the spinner. In the match England played at the ground six weeks ago, the edge of the cracks were raised up slightly above the level of the pitch, hinting that uneven bounce could be a factor should the match go deep into the fourth day. With that possibility, the enervating heat and the thought of giving the bowlers a bit longer to recover from Adelaide (James Anderson was excused nets yesterday), Cook will want to win the toss and bat even if it means the batsmen confronting their own demons as well as the demon fast bowler. Such focus on Johnson places pressure on him, which is why Clarke, whose own Waca average of 37 is an example of how even the best batsmen can find Perth difficult, was keen to play down the left-armer's influence on the series and build up the rest of his bowlers. "It's nice the way Mitch is going that's for sure, but it is the attack that is important," Clarke said. I spoke to the bowlers before the start of the series and told them they were the best in the world, on my judgment as a batsman, and that this was an opportunity to show that - and I think they are doing that at the moment. It is hard to argue with him, especially in this series on home soil, and if they prove their captain right again the Ashes will be Australia's. Or arguably the greatest comeback in cricketing history starts here.