Twenty-five days: it seems long enough to decide anything once and for all, except perhaps peace in the Middle East, or who is one’s favourite character in The Wire. But after fifteen days the Ashes still seems almost impossibly tight, while also susceptible to even minor influences. Consider a matter of superficially minor significance: the role of short leg.
Next time you watch Shane Warne take his Test hat-trick at the MCG on 29 December 1994 with the wicket of Devon Malcolm, check where David Boon is standing to take the bat-pad chance: forward of the wicket at 45 degrees to the striker’s stumps. That was the tradition into which we were born, the crouching Eknath Solkar or Mike Smith making even defensive strokes a dangerous speculation. Not today. For Australia Simon Katich and Phillip Hughes, and for England Ian Bell and Alastair Cook, have gone under helmets and on haunches to a position at least 7 to 10 feet square of the wicket on the on side—and so far have caught nothing save the bat-helmet chance from Pietersen in Cardiff.
Nobody seems interested in bat-pad catches any longer, and everyone is rather too concerned with the slog-sweep; the emphasis of the modern short leg, when he is posted at all, is on the catch taken from the face of the bat. This might already have had consequences in this series. Before lunch on the last day in Cardiff, Paul Collingwood (11) propped forward to Nathan Hauritz, and an inside edge rebounded to where a David Boon would have taken the chance easily. Katich was 2 feet too deep. Just short fell the ball; just short of a series lead fell Australia.
Mind you, at least Ponting had posted someone. On Sunday evening, Mike Hussey took guard on a king pair, facing his first-innings conqueror Graham Onions. He was bound to thrust forward, but the fielder who should have been at short leg was languishing at mid-on, as though for the famous Hussey on-drive which he doesn’t play. Hussey, as an overanxious batsman is wont to do, plunged headlong at the line of the delivery, thick-edged onto the flap on his pad, and the ball hung in space long enough for Onions almost to bridge the distance from his follow-through. Hussey stood transfixed, his career flashing before his eyes, and survived by inches, smashing Onions’ follow-up half-volley through mid-off to commence a rehabilitative half-century.
Australia might still have survived had a short leg been deputised, but Hussey would not be playing at Headingley. Any runs he makes henceforward, and they may be crucial in such a closely contested series, arise from that oversight of Strauss, and also Test match cricket’s The Wire-like richness.