The England coach wants to give players more time to work on their basic skills and better prepare them for facing teams as strong as Australia.

Nasser Hussain admitted in the aftermath of England's third-Test defeat - which sealed Australia's eighth successive Ashes series triumph - that county cricket was never going to be good enough preparation.

But Fletcher believes England could go a long way towards closing that gap simply by allowing more time for players to work on their technique.

He said: "There's enough talent in county cricket to take England forward, but the one area I would look at is the amount of cricket being played.

"There is too much cricket being played and people should be able to practice and sort out their technique, but they have to be given the opportunity to look at that technique like they do here in the southern hemisphere."

Fletcher also concedes that England must find a way of finding tougher cricketers capable of handling pressurised situations and battling it out even against the best teams in the world.

He said: "You can't hide from the fact that it was important we came out here to see how far we have improved. We've made some progress over the last couple of years and losing the first three Test matches has knocked us a little bit.

"They are a good experienced side and they've played well against other Test countries as well, but to some degree we didn't play as well as we could have and it's difficult to pinpoint why that is.

"But we didn't bat well under pressure. The only way you find players who can handle pressure is expose them to that sort of intensity and that sort of bowler coming at you on a regular basis."

While Fletcher was conducting a post-mortem into yet another England Ashes failure, injured fast bowler Alex Tudor linked up with the squad again after spending a night in hospital recovering from being hit by a Brett Lee bouncer.

Tudor said: "When the ball first hit me I panicked big time and straight away put the glove to my head and saw a lot of blood, but luckily I had Alec Stewart at the other end and Darren Lehmann at short leg and they calmed me down a little bit.

"I was panicking that something serious could have happened to my eye and I just thank God that everything was okay."