Retired champion leg-spinner Shane Warne has blamed Australian coach John Buchanan's training methods for contributing to Australia's first one-day finals defeat at home in 14 years.
England stunned the cricket world by beating the top-ranked Australians 2-0 in their best-of-three triangular one-day series finals here last weekend.
England lost the Ashes Test 5-0 to Australia in the first series sweep in 86 years, but finished on the top of the Aussies, winning their last three tri-series matches against Ricky Ponting's fading team.
Warne, who often was at odds over Buchanan's coaching methods during his time in the Australian team until his retirement after the fifth Ashes Test last month, blamed Australia's heavy training workload for their tri-series defeat.
Team officials said the training technique was designed to ensure the Australian team is at its physical peak for next month's World Cup in the Caribbean.
"If you are playing international cricket, all you want to do is feel fresh and happy -- you don't want to be training into the ground," Warne said in a television interview on Thursday. "They got tired for the finals and didn't perform very well and John Buchanan has to take responsibility for that."
Only a few weeks after lamenting the lack of a meaningful challenge from New Zealand and England, Buchanan said in his review, published on the Cricket Australia Web site, that the slip in standards could partly be explained by the team's expectation it would keep winning.
"As we wing our way to New Zealand, there is not a member of the team that believed we would be heading across the Tasman, minus the winner's medal for the Commonwealth Bank Series," Buchanan wrote in his review. "In some small part, the expectation of continuing our winning ways through the series will have contributed to the final result. Certainly, with only two preliminary games to go, we had little to convince us that we would be playing England."
"Nevertheless, I do recall a coach of the Australian team calling for stiffer opposition halfway through the tournament, and this is exactly what we were faced with during the latter half of the series," he added.
Buchanan said the decision to taper the team's training workload and the injury to Andrew Symonds also helped explain the decline.
Buchanan is standing down as Australia's coach after the World Cup in April and will be replaced by his former assistant Tim Nielsen.
Buchanan, 53, has the exceptional record of 69 wins in 90 Tests in charge of the Australian team, and having started with 15 successive victories in 1999-2001, finished his coaching reign with 12 straight victories in the Sydney Test.
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