DO the Aussies think they can grab a beer and make everything better?

Surely their glass is half empty if they are having to turn to Michael Beer, a player with just 16 first-class wickets from five games?

Just like a Las Vegas drunk putting his last dollar down on the roulette table, this looks to be the final, desperate throw of the dice by the Australian selectors.

I suspect there will be some sore heads from the post-Perth hangover if England maintain their dominance and retain the Ashes by Christmas with victory in the Third Test.

One man who has really come of age on this tour is Alastair Cook. From being the next man for the chop, he is marking himself out as the next England captain.

Parallels can be drawn between his new-found status and the way Michael Vaughan finally realised his massive potential as a Test batsman on the 2002-03 tour Down Under.

On that particular trip, the Yorkshire ace scored three huge centuries on his way to an aggregate of more than 600 runs in the series.

Like Cook, Vaughan had struggled in the one-day format of the game and his orthodox style of batting looked like being more style than substance.

The big scores were not coming consistently enough and huge potential looked like it may never come to full fruition, a là Mark Ramprakash and Graeme Hick.

To be fair to Cook, he had scored more than 4,000 Test runs before boarding the plane to Oz but there is an argument to suggest that he might have been jettisoned had he not scored a decent amount of runs against Ricky Ponting and Co.

Now, however, he is rightly being lauded as the heir to Andrew Strauss’s throne.

During his struggle for runs last summer, Cook revealed his pain when a young boy strolled up to him in the supermarket and bluntly advised the batsman that he was not playing very well.

That off-the-cuff remark in the aisles jolted the 25-year-old.

But what better way to silence the critics than a trolley-load of runs that have left the old enemy punch-drunk enough to select the unheralded Beer?