All week, commentators and columnists have wrung their hands over crowd misbehaviour and the general uncouthness of cricket’s hoi polloi. England today found the answer. Folding for their lowest score in an Ashes Test at Headingley in 100 years, then plunging to a 94-run arrears, they left the hard core of patriots on the West Stand utterly dumbstruck.
Ricky Ponting was inevitably the subject of boos, but he might almost miss them now. ‘Hopefully they’ll boo me more because it will mean I’ve done well,’ he said of the crowd on match eve, and he certainly gave them their opportunity, powering to 78 from 101 balls. It was a day, in fact, that Australia’s captain will enjoy replaying in his mind, when even the toss was not a bad one to lose. He would have batted; Strauss did and, on a pitch that encouraged pace bowlers with bounce and sideways movement, watched his team dissolve.
It was a long day for both leaders, the whittling of thirty players at the ground to a final twenty-two before play being a madcap affair, rumour and hearsay commingling with injury and indisposition. The Official Secrets Act status of Andrew Flintoff’s knee was finally revoked, and the lurking suspicion that Brett Lee would not make the cut was also confirmed.
At various points before a delayed toss Michael Clarke, with a stomach complaint, and Matt Prior, with a back spasm, were also rumoured omissions; a distant Tim Ambrose was placed on stand-by for the latter. Brad Haddin, meanwhile, was included almost as abruptly as he was excluded at Edgbaston. It was like a game of selection bingo, although the winning combinations jointly accented pace, with Steve Harmison and Stuart Clark coming in for their first Tests of the summer.
At the pre-match preliminaries, Andrew Strauss shyly acknowledged that it had been ‘a busy morning’; in his team’s case, it had actually begun at 5 a.m., thanks to a malfunctioning fire alarm. He may have been feeling its effects when he took guard, for the Test’s first ball, from Hilfenhaus, bent gently back in and struck a front pad that had barely budged. Late in a second innings, a tailender similarly adjacent might have been given out; Hawk-Eye suggested a point of impact roughly top of leg. But such decisions do not befall captains on the first ball of Tests, and Billy Bowden was duly impervious to a unanimous and prolonged entreaty.
In Siddle’s second over, however, Strauss drove expansively at a wide one—the sort of shot against which he usually steels himself. Siddle hasn’t looked comfortable bowling to left-handers on this tour, equivocating about coming round the wicket, for he loses a few knots when he does so. To be gifted with such a vital breakthrough from over the wicket so early was cause for great thanksgiving.
After Ravi Bopara tucked in against the West Indies in May, Andy Flower volunteered that he rated the 24-year-old ‘very highly, talent-threshold wise’. Bopara has since looked increasingly vulnerable, batting-at-number-three-wise, and today departed so tamely as to call his actual place into question. The reproving glance he cast the pitch after gloving to gully was that of a batsman looking for excuses; batsmen at first-wicket-down must be prepared for pace and all its hazards.
It was when Clark bowled the thirteenth over that the visitors’ grip really strengthened, reminding everyone, including his captain, why he was Australia’s man of the series during the last Ashes skirmish. Johnson blasted out Bell between some wilder scatterings, but Clark levered out Collingwood, Cook and Broad without relieving the pressure for a moment, the batsmen scoring from only 14 of his 60 deliveries.
Siddle ended the innings with the pick of the figures, 5 for 21 in two spells from the Rugby Stand End, as England’s last five batsmen smuggled just six runs through the field from 44 deliveries. There was no doubt, however, that Clark’s was the critical stabilising influence—the influence that Australia have lacked all summer. It was the influence that England also palpably wanted for, once Anderson opened the bowling with two execrable half-trackers to Watson, both of which disappeared for four.
Harmison had Katich pocketed at a leg gully that Strauss had posted the ball before, but Ponting was swiftly underway, so swiftly that Australia’s first fifty was raised in 39 deliveries, and they had accumulated as many boundaries as England within 35 minutes. ‘Get him on the chopping board, Punter!’ yelled a triumphal Australian voice—and there were a few of those today—when Onions joined the attack. Ponting coolly pulled for six, plundering 17 runs in the over.
For a batsman with relatively few recent runs to speak of, Ponting looked imperious, the master of his domain. When Watson played and missed a little loosely at Anderson, Ponting sauntered all the way down the pitch to issue further instructions; with centuries on his last two visits here, he was entitled to claim some expert knowledge.
At times, Harmison looked threatening. At others, his action looked more than ever like the Heimlich manoeuvre. He began his second spell with three looping long-hops, which Watson pulled, pulled and cut for four, then gave way after a second over conceding 10 runs. The bowling change precipitated England’s only half-decent interlude of the day, when three wickets fell in 19 deliveries before Clarke and North consolidated.
Five minutes after stumps at 6.30 p.m., as though there had been a bomb alert evacuation, the ground was almost empty. Part of it may have been disgust: the crowd had seen only 81 overs in six and a half hours of cricket—an altogether dismal rate of progress. On the other hand, many would have felt they’d seen quite enough.