It wasn’t 2005—and how often will that be said this summer?—but the first day of the Ashes of 2009 provided just the sort of tense, fluctuating, attritional cricket widely foreseen, with one exception of lavish, almost stupendous stupidity.
For a player of his quality, Kevin Pietersen finds some decidedly odd ways to get out, like an ace contract bridge player who keeps forgetting the rules to 500. Today it was a premeditated fetch to leg from 3 feet wide of off stump that looped to short leg via his helmet, ending three hours of diligent application, and England’s top score.
The beneficiary of Pietersen’s largesse was a deserving one: Nathan Hauritz, said so often not to be Shane Warne that he must sometimes feel like issuing a pre-emptive public apology. Hauritz would have been an onlooker had Brett Lee maintained fitness, and still seems to lack the variation necessary to prosper at the top level. But the delivery in question could hardly have been improved on, drifting away towards slip and dragging Pietersen so wide that he almost ended up on the neighbouring pitch.
It was a day from which Australia and England could take a good deal, even if neither team was quite good enough to retain the initiative for long. The Australian pace bowlers who did Ricky Ponting proud in South Africa again competed tigerishly, gaining from the air the movement that the pitch did not offer. Each of England’s top six stayed a while, and Strauss won an advantage with the toss, Australia’s fate of batting last shaping as a significant challenge.
The rest of Strauss’s day was less satisfactory, Australia’s bowlers reminding him of his misadventures with the pull shot down under in 2006–07. Strauss looked determined to abjure the stroke—under-edging one, genuflecting to another, picking a third off his hip—but neither played nor left the last ball of the twentieth over, which carried on from glove to slip. It was a wicket for thought, Johnson having thought just enough, Strauss perhaps a little too much.
There was a pleasing vernacular quality to the pace attack: plumber’s mate (Johnson), bricklayer (Hilfenhaus) and woodchopper (Siddle) all put in suitably tradesmanlike performances, and all were picked ahead of the banker (Clark), doubtless to Alistair Darling’s satisfaction. Ravi Bopara’s Ashes debut, by contrast, did not resolve the doubts aired about him by Shane Warne a couple of weeks ago— specifically, that he cared too much about his appearance. There are certainly some ostentatious flourishes to Bopara’s game—the curtsey as he lets the ball go, the frozen front elbow after every defensive stroke—and there were opportunities to evaluate them as the only scoring stroke of his first twenty balls was an inside edge to fine leg. One of Pietersen’s skittish singles caught Bopara unawares, perhaps admiring his image on the big screen. He prospered only when Siddle allowed him width, and was ultimately hoodwinked by Johnson: five overs after miscuing one slower ball safely, he did the same terminally.
On such a pitch four years ago, Warne would have bowled in the first hour, having probably pestered Ponting for the new ball. Hauritz had to wait until 2 p.m. before coming on with the Taff and tour figures of 2 for 260 behind him. At first he did basically what one expected of him—little wrong but nothing special, improving Australia’s over rate but providing little grist for his Cricket Australia tour blog.
Pester power seemed in evidence in mid-afternoon when Michael Clarke was deployed for five rather pointless overs in harness with Hauritz, a period in which 37 runs accumulated at no apparent risk to either Pietersen or his escort Paul Collingwood. Clarke is known to fancy his bowling, to the extent of it being a team in-joke, but Hauritz surely needed more pressure from the opposite end. Hilfenhaus, meanwhile, went almost thirty overs without bowling, and when he did return had Collingwood caught behind and Pietersen trapped plumb in front of all three, except that Billy Doctrove agreed with perhaps only Pietersen’s parents and gave him not out.
The reaction was as much a study as the delivery. Hilfenhaus groaned, Ponting chuntered at length, but the appeal was in truth a little ragged, some fielders interested also in the caught behind. Umpires are sensitive to ambiguity, and influenced by uniformity of appeals, so it wasn’t only Shane Warne’s bowling that was missed today but also his undiluted, unreconstructed come-on-ump-you-know-they’re-here-to-watch-me-bowl cries for justice. Over the years Australians have been criticised with some force for the pressure they place on umpires; it would be perverse to criticise them for the opposite, but it is a habit they may have lost to their cost.
The Australians did not have long to rue their luck, for Clarke soon after shelled Pietersen at cover—in much the same fashion that Pietersen shelled Clarke at a critical juncture in the corresponding Test four years ago, leading to Clarke’s best score in England. Hauritz’s coup to remove Pietersen soon after, however, ruined yet another 2005 parallel.
By now, in fact, the 2005 parallels were beginning to fade in significance—the day was taking on a pleasing quality of its own. The last session featured 142 runs in thirty-one overs, including an hour’s crisp and fluent strokeplay from Matt Prior and Andrew Flintoff, and four wickets, including two in fourteen deliveries with the second new ball to Siddle, who provided an object lesson in sticking to the basics and trying nothing too fancy—a lesson Pietersen is still to learn. A few more sessions like this last, in fact, and this series might begin standing on its own feet rather than seeming at times a pretext for interspersing highlights of four years ago.