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.

Broad shoulders the burden

To English fans it felt longer, a lot longer but it was in fact only a six year period that separated Ian Botham’s last Test match appearance in 1992 from Andrew Flintoff’s first. The holy grail for a cricket team is to be able to include an all-rounder capable of deciding a game with either bat or ball. Alongside Jacques Kallis and the unconventionally brilliant Adam Gilchrist it was Flintoff that completed the triumvirate of the next generation to follow Botham, Imran Khan, Kapil Dev and Richard Hadlee. Whilst all England fretted over the end of the talismanic Flintoff’s career they did not expect Friday at the Oval to confirm the growth from fawn to stag of Stuart Broad. Whisper it quietly no longer; he is the complete package.

It’s easy to criticise an English cricketer and many have criticised Broad for his propensity to deliver four-balls and a lack of wickets. However, he is a young intelligent cricketer who works hard at his game. He bats classically, he fields athletically and now he has started to bowl accurately and with cunning. It was a hard apprenticeship served running in on flat pitches in India and the West Indies for little reward. However, when England has needed a hero to produce a career-defining performance at the death it was Broad that stepped up to deliver a spell of bowling of 5-37 that left England shocked and Australia pole-axed.

For almost the first time in his Test career Broad performed the accurate impersonation of Glenn McGrath that supporters have been calling for. It has been ignored that at the age of 23 Broad is playing his 21st Test; at the same age McGrath was yet to make his debut for Australia. Too much too soon is expected of talented young players thrown in to the crucibles of Test cricket and the media spotlight. Give Broad a chance to spread his wings and grow in to his art as a bowler. Then he will feel equipped to shoulder the burden of the attack as McGrath once did for 13 distinguished years.

The Oval pitch has come in for criticism as being a ‘result pitch’. This is no bad thing yet it has not been doctored to favour England. Yes, England won the toss and made first use of the strip – it could have been Australia that won the toss and elected to bat. Yes, England picked a front-line spinner to take advantage of the turn and bounce that the Oval offers – Australia could have done likewise. The 23 wickets that have fallen in two days have owed more to poor umpiring decisions, disciplined bowling and poor batting than demons in the pitch.

A lead of 230 runs with 7 wickets in hand places England firmly in the driving seat at the end of day two but the Ashes aren’t regained yet. As the twists and turns in this series have made many cricket writers sound less knowledgeable than even Kerry Katona on a daytime television show your correspondent will not be making any predictions. Suffice to say that it’s not the first but the twentieth wicket that is the hardest to take and the Australians will fight until the end.