Storm clouds gathering

In April that national barometer of depression, the Met Office, predicted a ‘barbecue summer’ in the UK. At the same time, most considered cricketing opinion regarded England as the snag on that barbecue and any one of sixteen touring Australians taking it in turns to man the tongs. Fast forward three months and the Met Office has revised their forecast downwards – it’s officially umbrella time. If that was predictable then the cricket has been anything but. With the Third Test due to start today – weather permitting – England finds itself in the surprising position of being one up with three to play which still leaves plenty of time to revert to type and assume their traditional supine position when facing Australia.

With the quality of cricket during the first two matches generally poor and with both sides rarely playing at the top of their game simultaneously then happily the series has not lacked in excitement. However, it is the absence of the personalities from the last contest that are being missed the most, having retired to stud - or so all of Australia hopes. So confident is Andrew Strauss that he stated publicly that he thinks Australia have lost their aura – and he’s right. Fine players all, the new wearers of the baggy green do not possess the cricketing CVs of their predecessors - yet.

Mitchell Johnson arrived in England as an Aussie champion; the leader of the attack who had taken more than twice as many Test wickets as any other Australian in the last year. In his first two Ashes Test matches Johnson has bowled so poorly that he has given pie-throwers a bad name.

Phil Hughes arrived on these shores with even more hyperbole due to the brilliant start he had made to his Test career against South Africa. His natural tendency of backing away to leg was part of the genius of his game and seemingly enabled him to crash almost any ball to the offside boundary. Three innings later the backing away to leg is now seen as a sign of mental and technical weakness as Hughes runs scared from the short ball.

To watch the wheel-nuts working themselves loose on a cricket team is never a wholly pleasant experience, even if it is Australia in need of a wrench. Standing in the middle of an arena for six hours a day being heckled by a raucous crowd of 20,000 as you struggle to rediscover the secret to your success is not a scenario that you or I have had the pleasure of confronting as we earn our corn. Unlike the genteel crowd at Lords, the spectators at Edgbaston will need no invitation to barrack Johnson and Hughes. There is no hiding place either in the outfield or behind one of the Australian legends of yesteryear.

If Matthew Hayden or Justin Langer had been his partner and mentor then would Phil Hughes, just 20, have started the series more confidently? If Glenn McGrath had been opening the bowling would Mitchell Johnson have discovered his rhythm? Truly great players don’t just score runs or take wickets as if they’re shelling peas but they occupy the media and crowd’s attention. They enable junior players to come in to a team and learn the ropes without the pressure of being exposed to the full glare of publicity. Johnson and Hughes have suffered so far on this tour but both are made of stern stuff and just like the weather forecast, you wouldn’t bet against them turning it round if given the chance.

The groundsman may have described the Edgbaston pitch as ‘jelly’ but this match need not end in the widely forecast draw. The English batting remains too carefree and indisciplined to bat Australia out of a game. The suggestion being that if Stuart Clark is picked - and surely he must be if the Australian selectors are on the ball - and can bring the unfashionable disciplines of line and length back to the Australian attack then they will be in with a shout. England can’t rely on Flintoff’s heroics to inspire them in every round against Australia so we may just need some of that rain to lend a hand and save us too. Umbrellas up.

Champions for the Ages

You can’t keep a good man down and Andrew Flintoff demonstrated again at Lords on Monday that he is far more than that with a brutal display of the art of fast bowling that clinched victory for England in the Second Test. When he declared last week that this Test series would be his last the British media rushed to evaluate Flintoff’s position in the pantheon of cricketers. Would he be remembered as a cricketing great?

With a bowling average marginally to the north of his batting average those that swear by statistics are adamant that Flintoff will not be remembered as a great. Fortunately players are not judged merely by statistics but through their contribution to the game and the bigger the game the bigger the contribution from Flintoff.

If the majority of the current Australian team were cowering behind the couch when Flintoff took the 2005 Ashes battle to the likes of Langer, Hayden, Gilchrist, Gillespie, McGrath and Warne not to mention Ponting, Clarke and Lee then they had the fortune to have a front row seat in the shooting gallery this time round. They would have heard rumours that he’d lost his effectiveness. They would have known that he was injury plagued and that his body could no longer adequately support his burning ambition. They thought they had him cornered in Cardiff but at the home of cricket it was Flintoff that wrote the script as only a great player can.

There are fast bowlers that are naggingly accurate, some that are seriously quick but none that currently play the game and only a select few before who have been able to combine the accuracy, pace and sheer outright hostility that Flintoff possesses. To have those attributes is one thing but to harness them repeatedly on the biggest stage of all and to affect the course of a game in its final throes is what elevates Flintoff to the category of greatness in his field.

A curious thing happened as the England team were welcomed off the pitch back in to the Long Room. Ricky Ponting, a cricketer with a less than spotless reputation for sportsmanship, had already given a balanced on-pitch interview when he appeared to bow down to Flintoff as he entered the Long Room ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glegJFgXUBc). Of course he may just have been adjusting the trip-wire for the big man but in an admirable display of sportsmanship Ponting went on to shake every England player’s hand. Conduct in defeat as well as in victory is the mark of a great sportsman.

Be certain though, Flintoff didn’t win this test on his own; the cornerstone of victory was an outstanding opening partnership between Strauss and Cook that set the tone for the match, followed up by exemplary swing bowling from Anderson and rounded off by Flintoff. However, the ability to hold the crowd in the palm of one hand and gladiatorally hurl the red leather ball at 93mph with the other is one of the great sights in world sport. Let’s enjoy Andrew Flintoff, this champion for the ages, whilst we still can for the remainder of the summer.

Pokerface

In the Sky commentary box on Day Three there was a frisson of excitement as Andrew Strauss elected not to enforce the follow-on after Australia were bowled out for a first innings score of 215. The buzz was coming from Shane Warne who was in no doubt that Ricky Ponting and his beleaguered team would be sitting in the dressing room re-energised that they had been offered an olive branch by Strauss and an escape route from a probable defeat. It wouldn’t be the first time that Warne had used some cod psychology where the Poms were concerned.

Granted, the Australian bowling attack again did their best to coax the England middle order back in to form but Australia knew that batting last at Lords would hold no demons if the lessons of history were to repeat and the pitch flatten out. In 2008 England could only take three wickets as South Africa followed on and ran up 393 in 167 overs to see out the draw. This coupled with Australia’s inability to gift England Ashes wins and the Poms tendency to freeze at the prospect of winning a live match will ensure more than the odd butterfly in the stomachs of England fans as they wake up this Monday morning. Australia need an improbable but not entirely out of the question 209 further runs to win with five wickets in hand.

In a judicious PR move by the England management they sent Graeme Swann out to do the media rounds at the end of the fourth day. An ebullient character he sent out a confident message, “We still have a new ball with Andrew Flintoff roaring in at 90mph and James Anderson swinging it at the other end." He’s right, as so many times before much will depend on Flintoff, in possibly his last Test, pounding in with a ball only six overs old.

It’s not just in the Sky commentary box that Warne has been getting excited. In their effort to bring you the very best live sport from around the world - or rather that which they have bought the rights to - Sky now fill their late night schedules with poker and what more imaginative idea during the Ashes than to broadcast ‘Poker Ashes’. I know little about poker but I do know that Shane Warne, famed for sowing more than a few seeds of doubt in to the minds of batsmen, was also fond of chatting to bookmakers about cricket and indulging in a spot of extra-marital poke-her. He sounded like an inspired choice to be team captain.

Accompanying Warne were fellow legends Dean Jones and Jeff Thomson. Jones was taking this particularly seriously. You could tell because he was wearing sunglasses and the same zinc cream over his lips that I saw him wearing as he raced round the boundary for Derbyshire against Middlesex on an overcast day in Uxbridge many moons ago. At least Thomson wouldn’t start his run up from by the slot machines, or would he?

It’s not immediately obvious who was on the selection committee for the England Poker Ashes team – possibly the same selectors who were responsible for calling up 28 players during the 1990’s who made less than 5 appearances for England. Sure enough if watching Min Patel take one wicket in his two test career was enthralling then I hoped that he’d been saving himself for this moment. England’s team was captained by that man for all gimmicky programs, Darren Gough. Whether it’s splashing about in a pool of water wearing lycra or dancing the American Smooth then Gough’s your man. Shoring up the middle order was Rob Key, the current Kent captain, who clearly sees more of a future for himself in poker rather than cricket.

As it turned out the Poms were predictably dispatched faster than a Mitchell Johnson long-hop to the cover boundary as the Australians established an unassailable 3-1 lead. Warne, relishing the chance to captain an Australian team for once in his career, was delighted, ‘The boys played really well. I’m really happy with it.’ We’ll see if Warne can keep that pokerface on as he returns to the commentary box to witness what will be another day of high stakes Ashes cricket.

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.

England: another opportunity missed

To paraphrase an eminent politician; ‘The England cricket team never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity’. In the aftermath of the First Ashes Test in Cardiff and after England snatched a draw from the jaws of a sixth consecutive defeat to Australia, the England coach Andy Flower had tried to put a positive spin on events and spoke of the lessons learnt and the positives that his side would take forward to Lords.

Few listened to Flower’s comments because of the storm in a tea-cup inspired by England’s naive choice of delaying tactics as the First Test came to the boil. The post-match debate raged around the ‘spirit of the game’, mystifyingly championed by Ricky Ponting who in an online poll in the Sydney based Daily Telegraph in January 2008 inspired 83% of the respondents to say that the brawler from Tasmania was not a good ambassador for the game and that 79% felt that the Australian team did not play in the ‘true spirit of the game’.

Let’s not kid ourselves here; the reality was that there were no positives to take from Cardiff for this England team. Out-bowled and out-batted England made first use of a flat track and mustered a first innings score that was soon put in to perspective by Australia against a toothless attack unable to build any pressure. Yes, it might be what passes for management speak in these days of media sound bites but for Andy Flower to talk of positives to be taken from the game was disingenuous and insulted the intelligence of the cricket supporting public. Furthermore The Ashes is not the place to learn lessons; it remains the pinnacle of cricket in both England and Australia and not the place to dot the i’s and cross the t’s in your game.

Fast forward to the first day at Lords and it’s clear that few of England’s batsmen have heeded Flower’s call to arms. Winning the toss and batting first Australia’s attack can rarely have been made to look so porous. To concede over 300 runs on the first day in successive Tests is no fluke; 364/6 coming off the back of 336/7 in Cardiff. This Australian attack is threadbare.

Reduced to two performing front line bowlers in the resilient Siddle and the impressive Hilfenhaus there were overthrows, byes, long-hops and half-volleys galore. Ricky Ponting’s gimlet eyes narrowed yet further and one wondered if he would shut them completely and cast his mind back to the days when he could throw the ball to the living legends of Warne and McGrath. Only Punter didn’t need to worry too much because he knows that this England side are incapable of learning on the job. Time and again the middle order have disintegrated and as at Cardiff there was a lack of basic technique and application required in the five day format.

Andrew Strauss must despair that after carrying his bat for a magnificent 161 his partners have again let him down. Whilst he may have been diplomatic to the press let us hope that he did not mince his words in the dressing room. Of course, you should never judge a Test match until both sides have batted but on a placid pitch against this attack it’s another opportunity missed by England to put an imposing score on the board and put Australia out of the game.