Brilliant - but now England must sustain success after Ashes

We can now dare to hope that for the first time in a generation England may have got the monkey off its back when it comes to sporting success. That it came against the old enemy Australia is all the more special.

We are all too familiar with our sporting heroes promising great joy but delivering only despair and anguish.

How refreshing it is to see Australia for a change going through that agony as they try to figure out why their batsmen and bowlers dominated the series, yet they return home as losers.

The reason is simple. Australian batsmen may have scored more centuries than England's, their bowlers taken more wickets, but when it came to the really big moments that decided the series Andrew Strauss and his men won them all.

That is always the mark of all truly successful sporting nations. They perform at their best when it really matters.

What is even more encouraging is that this English team appears to have turned the historical tide of an Ashes series.

All too often the Australian capacity to bounce back and surprise England has proved decisive.

Yet in this Ashes series England have consistently caught the Australians unawares, starting with that draw in the first Test in Cardiff.

Australia were so surprised at not securing victory that they complained of a lack of sportsmanship by England.

In contrast, England bounced back spectacularly to win at Lord's for the first time since the previous great depression of the 1930s.

However, the decisive English surprise was reserved for the Oval.

Australia's massive victory at Headingley in the Fourth Test suggested the old order was back, all they had to do to retain the Ashes was draw the final Test and not too many teams come back from the sort of shattering loss England suffered.

It is a measure of the new England that they did so with such style at the Oval.

It bore out Strauss's comment that this Australian team no longer had an aura about it and throughout the series England played without a sense of fear, so much so that they were not even afraid to experiment.

In the past this would have been unthinkable. Because Australia have so often dominated England, English cricket always approaches an Ashes series in a state of nerves, reluctant, for instance, to blood new players.

The unspoken fear has been whatever the newcomer may have done against the others, the Australians will always find him out.

Yet in this series, with one iconic player, Kevin Pietersen, injured and another, Andrew Flintoff, eyeing retirement, England did experiment and with spectacular results at the Oval when Jonathan Trott set up the victory with a century in his first Test.

But wonderful as this victory is, just as the Romans used to warn their generals in their moment of triumph of the perils ahead, we would do well to learn the lesson of the 2005 series.

That in many ways was a more vivid series and with many more exciting matches, it gripped the nation.

Even my wife began to ask me about the googly - but it did not justify the hoopla or the honours that followed.  

Victories like the one at the Oval yesterday are only meaningful if in the long term they prove the basis for sustained success.

There is enough here to suggest this may now prove the case.

But for that we must wait another 18 months when England return to Australia.

If the momentum of the Oval can be maintained then we shall know that a new England has indeed emerged.

Until then it would be best to keep the victory buses in the garage and the gongs in the cupboard.