Mastered

It will be remembered as ‘People’s Monday’ at Lords. The queues of fans snaked through St John’s Wood from the crack of dawn but it was going to take some Indian charm of the highest order to extract a result from a high class 2000th Test. They came to see the little master shoulder the burden of saving his nation at cricketing HQ but England were reading from a different script.

Deep in the final session of play a rejuvenated Stuart Broad trapped Ishant Sharma in front of his stumps for his seventh wicket of the match and England took a deserved lead in the four Test series with a convincing 196 run victory. The celebrations on the pitch showed the level of desire amongst the team to be recognised as the best in the business.

When England is credited with innovative thinking and the man dispensing the credit is S R Waugh then you take notice that this cricket team must have a bit about them. Australia found this to their cost in the winter and they may be smiling ruefully now that the English bowling attack has laid waste to the more vaunted Indian batting line-up dismissing them twice for under 300.

True, India suffered from injury and illness to Gambhir, Tendulkar and, crucially, Khan at various stages of this match but they also arrived under-cooked. Duncan Fletcher coached England to a glorious high in 2005 and humiliating low in 2006/07. More than anyone he knows the value of preparation for a high-octane series. Resting senior players for the recent tour of the West Indies and scheduling one warm-up game in advance of the Lord’s Test has proved insufficient against an England team performing as a cohesive unit.

As Kevin Pietersen, a deserved man of the match, put it succinctly ‘All departments seem to be covered.’ The batting showed grit in the first innings and when the foundations were rocked to the core in the second innings it was Prior and Broad who took the game away from India with a game-changing seventh wicket partnership of 162.

It was the bowling attack that really stood out and not just because of their height. It seems inconceivable that until last December the human tripod Tremlett had only played three Tests since his debut against India four years previously. In his 38th Test Broad finally discovered that he’s more likely to take wickets when the ball lands in the same half of the pitch as the batsman. The spin department out-bowled their more experienced counterpart. It was Anderson though that stepped up to the mark on the final day. Few bowlers in cricket will have taken the wickets of a more illustrious trio than Dravid, Laxman and Tendulkar in the same innings. It was a fitting reward for the leader of the attack.

India has only 3 days to re-group before Trent Bridge. They have the talent to turn this series around but they must act fast. There is a sense that this England is a younger, sharper, more disciplined and resourceful beast than the old masters of India can handle. A combination of great batsmen, cunning bowlers, shoddy fielding and gnarled coach may not be sufficient to see them come from behind.

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.

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.