Mark Taylor will be embarking on his 100th Test match at the Gabba in Brisbane today - but the Australian captain still remembers the day in England last year when his international career could so easily have met a premature end.

It was at Edgbaston in early summer that a desperately out-of-form Taylor dug into his own mental reserves one last time and came up with a first-Test century that did not prevent an England victory but certainly bought the battling left-hander the time he needed to re-establish himself as a top international opener.

Even having led Australia to a 3-2 Ashes victory on that tour Taylor had some catch-up work to do on his public appeal back home. Now, though, as he joins the elite who can look back on a century of Test match appearances, he is again the darling of the Australian cricketing public and press.

Taylor has just returned from leading his country to an historic series victory in Pakistan during which he equalled Sir Don Bradman's Australian record Test score of 334 in Peshawar, earning a guaranteed place in the hearts of the nation by deciding not to bat on and pass the highest score of his country's greatest sporting icon.

Only the fifth Australian in history to play 100 Tests, Taylor has also led his side to an unprecedented run of success, winning 10 out of the last 12 series to rank as one of the all-time great Test captains.

But his present appeal is a stark contrast to his vulnerability leading into that tour of England when a disastrous run of form resulted in mass criticism from former Test players, with Greg Chappell even claiming he was "mentally unfit" to be captain.

From that trough, though, he found a launch pad for a magnificent stage two of an enduring career. The rest is history, but Taylor admits he was beginning to question his own ability and was close to a decision that could have robbed him and his country of some of his best years.

"It was a tough time for me personally because I wasn't playing well and I started thinking whether my eye had gone and whether I was ever going to be as good a player as I was in the late 1980s and 1990s," he said.

It was the second string to Taylor's bow - as a top-notch captain - that gave him the impetus to carry on.

Edgbaston 1997 was crisis point for Taylor, who now concedes: "If I hadn't made runs in that second innings at Edgbaston I would have looked seriously at my own situation. I have always been reasonably good at distancing myself from my own cricket and judging how the side is going with me in it.

"If Mark Taylor bats badly or England win the Ashes, the rest of life will go on - it's not as if the whole world will come to an end if we lose a cricket game."