After the Third Test of the 2005 Ashes was drawn in the gloaming at Old Trafford, Australia’s last pair having survived the final four overs to save Ricky Ponting’s blushes, England’s captain Michael Vaughan drew his chagrined men together. Look at them, he said. Look at the Australians: their relief, their euphoria at merely saving a Test. That, he said, was a vulnerable team.
Now the roles are reversed, and it is Ponting who will be imparting the same truths to his Australians after England’s last line of resistance, James Anderson and Monty Panesar, lasted the final 69 deliveries at Sophia Gardens. This was a rout: Australia lost six for 674 in 181 overs, England 19 for 687 in 212 overs. But Australia’s inability to take a twentieth wicket leaves the teams all square for the Lord’s Test beginning Thursday.
Australia went extremely close—an inch or two would have done it. England’s main man on the last day, Paul Collingwood, should have been snaffled at bat-pad before lunch when he was 11, but Katich, a foot too deep, fell a fingertip short of the catch. The significance of the miss, as often in Test cricket, was understood only in retrospect, like one of those clues you kick yourself for overlooking in Agatha Christie: the telltale time of the delivery of a letter; a character’s childhood fondness for E Nesbit. In hindsight, too, Marcus North and Brad Haddin should perhaps have trusted themselves to play through the bad light at the end of the third day; Andrew Strauss’s remonstration with the umpires at the time is in retrospect deeply ironic.
The Australian press, as is their wont, have lashed the bungling English time wasting in the last few overs, and not without justification, although it was also, weirdly, part of the theatre of the climactic hour. Here is cricket, with its staggering variety of stipulations and prohibitions, and nobody was quite sure whether the day was being played to overs or time, while there was nothing to prevent physio Steve McCaig at the deathknock waddling onto the ground for no earthly reason. Had it been an IPL game, of course, one would have sensed at once the pretext for extra advertisements.
In hindsight, the Australians did not make the best of the time allowed them. That Ben Hilfenhaus bowled no more than twelve overs on the final day was puzzling to say the least. Ponting’s faith in his 27-year-old off-spinner Nathan Hauritz was commendable, but spinners tire too, and Hauritz’s fingers must have been worn out by his last few overs.
It’s England, though, who have far more to chew on ahead of the rematch at a venue where they have won a solitary Ashes Test since 1896: cricket’s curse of Tutankhamen. England’s first innings of 435 covered a multitude of sins. Pietersen’s technique has become disturbingly busy—the footwork too premeditated, the backlift too high—and he has lost the front-foot stride that made his height such an advantage four years ago. Constrained by his Achilles tendon injury, his movements resemble a frantic wobbling of a gear-stick that nonetheless leaves the car in neutral.
Much was heard in advance about the contrasting qualities of the members of England’s pace attack. The skills differed all right; the mediocrity was unanimous. Flintoff was fast in his first foray, slower with each succeeding spell. Panesar was a selection of misplaced nostalgia: built-in obsolescence, success at the start followed by steadily diminishing returns, is common among finger spinners in international cricket these days, and he seems no exception.
The prediction for Lord’s is another pudding pitch, as at Cardiff, implying that there will be few if any changes in either line-up, a case for the pace of Steve Harmison notwithstanding. Australia deserve to be favourites. Successful Ashes campaigns are built on a variety of emotional spurs: relief is not among them.