There was a brief security scare at Edgbaston today when West Midlands police investigated a hoax bomb threat, and a brief security scare in the Australian innings when their overnight batsmen fell before lunch with the team total just in credit. Both came to nought, the thin green-and-gold line of Michael Clarke and Marcus North placing the Test off limits to England with three and a half solid and dutiful hours of batting.
Their fifth-wicket partnership of 185 from 301 balls, concluding with Clarke’s twelfth Test hundred, not only preserved the vital spark of this Ashes series, but kept England in the field ahead of an oncoming back-to-back Test match beginning on Friday. England’s match-winner at Lord’s, Andrew Flintoff, laboured here through thirty wicketless overs, which won’t have enhanced his chances of opening the bowling at Headingley.
It was Flintoff to whom Strauss entrusted the day’s opening sallies, and he started gamely, troubling Hussey from round the wicket and twice drawing him into errant pull shots. The sight of Hussey shouldering arms these days must send a tremor through the next man in too.
Flintoff also tried out on Watson the habit he has developed in this series of commencing the return to his mark with a few backward steps, eyes still fixed on the batsman, like a cowboy backing towards the doors of a saloon while keeping his hands near his six-guns. It was pure theatre, but the bowling accompanying it was not. One Flintoff lifter tattooed Watson’s forearm; another took Watson in the solar plexus. Watson tucked into a couple of Swann full-pitches to reach his second fifty of the game, but, when Flintoff was relieved soon after, went too hard at his first ball from Anderson, thereby wasting his hard work.
Again Anderson commenced bowling under cloud cover, no more than half an hour after the ground had been bathed in sunshine. It’s getting to the point where you wouldn’t ask him to a barbecue. Clarke edged his first ball involuntarily to third man, and was opened up in Anderson’s next over by a perfect outswinger.
The next wicket, however, was Hussey, and the next wicket-taker, improbably, was Broad, not called for until the fiftieth over, and still to prove this summer that he is among the country’s best four pace bowlers rather than a Hugo Boss clothes horse. His twelfth ball did nothing in particular, but nor did Hussey, playing while not quite committing. The batsman’s best score all summer had neither saved the match for Australia nor quite resolved the questions about his place. Australia’s lead at lunch was only 59, but England needed wickets soon after—which, as the sun returned, they failed to take.
After that initial seven-over spell, in fact, Flintoff was hardly to be seen, wearing an England cap rather than his usual sun hat as if to remain incognito. He crooked an ankle during his four tentative overs after lunch, rising gingerly and retiring soon after. From the attack that is: Test cricket has him for another three weeks.
The greatest disappointment of the day was Swann, glamour boy of the morning’s back pages after his coup de main at Ponting’s expense last night. His variations of length suggested someone feeling the pressure of the occasion; nor did he find from the footmarks quite the assistance anticipated. Clarke, beaten by him at Lord’s, fought back particularly well, rocking right back to force shots through covers and point, then coming down the pitch to hit over the top. By the middle of the afternoon, with no further wickets down, England’s outcricket suggested a team that was comfortable with and protective of its series lead. Strauss almost conjured a wicket from the part-time varieties of Bopara, but dropped Clarke (38) at short midwicket from a short-arm pull.
The closest England came to a breakthrough thereafter was when Swann hit Clarke (43) on the boot and Prior dived after the rebound from Clarke’s shoulder. Clarke looked up to find English fielders in agitation and a puzzled-looking Koertzen—very possibly the last umpire one would wish to see under the circumstances. His level-headed colleague Aleem Dar counselled a clarifying call to third umpire Richard Kettleborough, and not out was the correct verdict. Soon after, Dar stepped smoothly in to placate Anderson, who had casually kicked a ball into North’s pad, only to see it rebound away for a run. The 41-year-old Pakistani had as good a match as his 60-year-old South African partner had a bad one; if there were more umpires as sound, there would be no talk of referrals.
Around tea, the intensity rather left the contest, and even the Mexican waves grew a little ragged, especially that rather tricky counter-clockwise variation. As much competition was to be found among the rival spectators. A group of inventive Australians formed a beer snake of anaconda proportions, conveying it the length of the terraces. Varying the famous football chant ‘You’ve Only Got One Song’, the Barmy Army replied with ‘You’ve Only Got One Snake’. That was asking for it: an alternative beer constrictor soon appeared on the opposite side of the ground, ferried by half a dozen men attired as chefs.
North reached his fifty from 90 balls in the second over of the second new ball, and Clarke his from 106 balls two overs later. They then picked up the pace, taking further toll of Swann and 17 from Bopara’s first over when he resumed after tea, although the partnership was broken soon after when Anderson flung himself to his right in the gully to catch North. Clarke then made rather heavy weather of his last half-hour: at 92, a ball from Broad he missed cuffed off stump without removing a bail; at 96, he snicked Bopara to third slip Anderson but a no-ball had been called.
By this stage, the game had been surrendered to the statisticians, and Clarke marked his fiftieth Test by reaching his fourth Ashes hundred with his fourteenth boundary off what proved the game’s last ball, Ponting declaring 262 runs ahead at 5.50 p.m. But the killer stat was 150: the overs lost to rain on the first and third days. Not that Australia will complain, acknowledging, like police, that anticlimax isn’t always to be regretted.