At his standing-room-only press conference yesterday, Andrew Strauss was unsurprisingly full of praise for his team, which had played ‘three and a half days’ of really good Test cricket. It was a shrewd assessment. Tests actually last five days. England’s 115-run win was a victory not of the excellent, but of the ‘good enough’, constructed around a first session of calm-browed batting and a sixth session of quality swing bowling in between quite a lot of grinding.
Strauss made a flinty century whose importance grew as the match progressed. His other key contribution was winning the toss, for it not only wrested for England the best batting conditions of the game but inflicted on Australia a kind of perfect bowling storm on the second day, bowlers freshened by four breaks (lunch, tea, two weather interruptions) making the most of a pitch freshened by rain. James Anderson looked twice the bowler he has, Andrew Flintoff the bowler he once was, and the same Australian batsmen who had murdered England in Cardiff succumbed to self-inflicted wounds, six wickets falling for 69.
From straits so dire, there was no stealing back, stoutly as Michael Clarke and Brad Haddin batted in their 185-run collaboration. It was rehabilitative for both. Clarke had made only three prior first-class hundreds in England, and had an unfulfilled tour four years ago; Haddin is bothering England with the bat, while also worrying Australia with his glovework. They showed what could be accomplished on a blameless surface that was probably at its best on the fourth day, their only failure being an inability to survive the first hour of the last morning. Had that initial thrust from Flintoff been withstood, there was not a lot of bowling to come.
Thus Strauss’s well-founded circumspection. When the ball is not swinging, Flintoff looks his only bowler likely to break through, and who would back him to play all five Tests? Graeme Swann gave a first glimmer of his capabilities in the second innings here, but Stuart Broad again and Graham Onions made scant impression. Add to this list the England players who have yet to make an impression at all— Ravi Bopara, Monty Panesar, even Kevin Pietersen—and the room for improvement looms large.
For Ponting, there is the consolation that no Test he faces could ever be quite so hard as this one. His team had the worst of the conditions, considerably the worst of the umpiring, and by far the worst of the captious media and the boorish crowd, which made the captain its particular butt. He might take a leaf from the book of Warwick Armstrong, a matchwinner here for Australia a hundred years ago, who in his captaincy followed a simple rule never to read the newspapers—what Ponting does about radio, TV, websites, blogs, Facebook and Twitter, of course, is another matter.
This was always a series between two teams with little to separate them, and it still is, which imbues with unusual weight what in other contexts might be minor considerations: injuries, umpiring, weather, tosses. These are also teams not quite good enough to grasp an ascendancy, to maintain it and to dominate—which sets the stage for three further intriguing and watchable pursuits of the good enough.