The Seventh Day Wonder

And on the seventh day a bowling attack arrived. We’ve had to sit through four innings and six days of this series before being rewarded for our patience with a dose of quality; a team bowling effort of concerted accuracy, sustained hostility and the exemplary execution of a plan. That it came from the England attack should not be a surprise; that the Australian batsmen succumbed in the fashion that they did, five were out playing cross batted shots, was the surprise.

As a collective unit the Australians didn’t adapt to the conditions and their total of 156/8 was the most they deserved. The ball was swinging under heavy cloud cover, the pitch carried more pace and bounce and most importantly of all England were on the money. Australia batted as if they were here to participate in a beer match. Whereas Mitchell Johnson had led the Australian attack with all the unpredictability of Andrew Flintoff steering a pedalo the totemic Lancastrian bowled with maximum hostility and customary control. Flintoff’s staggering record of only three 5 wicket hauls in his first-class career is the result not just of his back of a length bowling but of the pressure that he creates at one end to enable cheap wickets to fall at the other as batsmen relax. Once again he acted as the foil for the deserving Jimmy Anderson to rip out Hughes, Ponting, Clarke and North for a sum total of seven runs. If Anderson has been under-rated by the Australians before this series then they now know that they are dealing with a bowler who in the right conditions knows his game better than most.

Dean Jones, a brilliantly talented batsman and fielder, bridged the gap between the last time Australia were this poor (in the mid 1980s if you’re wondering) to the start of their emergence as the cricketing superpower in the early 1990s. He now spends his time passing off hyperbole as punditry and can also be found on Sky’s latest contribution to wallpaper television, ‘The Poker Ashes’. From a punditry perspective Deano’s not having the best of Ashes series; “I think (this) is the flattest batting track I have seen in ten years. Now if England are going to produce these type of pitches for the rest of the series the game will be hurt. This is not the type of pitch that we’ll be happy with. I can’t see Australia being dismissed out on this flat pitch.”

The omens don’t look good for Australia; Ricky Ponting is in grumpy gnome mode, Nathan Hauritz is recovering from a dislocated finger, Peter Siddle is struggling with a virus. Brad Haddin admitted on the first day that “The occasion at Lords got to a few of us. We probably tried a bit too hard early.” You can’t imagine Adam Gilchrist or Ian Healy admitting that – not until their biography anyway. Haddin was distracted again towards the end of play allowing himself to be preoccupied by trying to persuade the umpires to abandon play for the day – shortly after another futile conversation he was out mis-timing a pull when he should have been playing for stumps.

If the eighth day goes the way of the seventh Australia may need divine intervention but with periodic rain forecast for the remainder of the match they may just get it. It will need a more resilient and focused batting effort second time around but the baggy greens will do well to heed the lesson of Lords three years ago when Sri Lanka followed-on 359 runs behind after lunch on the third day and batted out 199 overs to draw the undrawable test. For England the message is clear too: they must clean up the tail and go for the jugular before the pitch slows up.