Ashes 2011 (12 page)

Encouragement for the bowlers lasted the first hour, Siddle gaining appreciable sideways movement when he pitched the ball up. In his sixth over he was driven imperiously on the up through point for four by Cook, and followed up with a peach of a ball that pitched leg and detoured round a groping bat to miss off. Great
mano e mano
stuff, this: the bowler prepared to be driven in order to draw the batsman forward; the batsman prepared to drive. Cook let the next go as it sizzled through at sternum height – détente resumed.

After lunch, Siddle tried a different approach, bouncing Cook with two men back, while Harris tried something similar to Trott with Ponting camped at leg gully. After his early tremors, in fact, Trott experienced some aftershocks involving the bouncer. To a rearing delivery from Bollinger on 44, he repeated the cramped, almost involuntary pull shot that cost him his wicket against Australia A, which this time fell safely. When Trott was 76, Haddin also parried rather than held a flying top edge from Harris.

Trott was actually somewhat less fastidious than in Brisbane, where he was taking longer to get ready than a supermodel, although this only limited the distance by which he has been the match's fussiest batsman rather than threatening his status. He marks his guard with a long repeated scrape of his right boot, which is becoming as much his signature as the Moonwalk was Michael Jackson's. He even marked his guard at the end of the last over before lunch: again, three slow, deliberate scrapes as if to mark a spot under which treasure was buried. As it was, Australia's short-pitched policy paid dividends when Clarke dived smartly to his left at mid-wicket to hold a shot off the hip – Trott can expect to see rather less bowling in his own half of the pitch this tour.

The sight of Pietersen wafting down the wicket to Doherty excited Australian thoughts of further inroads. Pietersen stood tall to cut his second ball for four, and sent the next floating over point from a thick outside edge. There was a flurry of interest in his patchy record against slow left-armers, who have dismissed him seventeen times in sixty-seven Tests.

In fact, Pietersen has an attribute which should by rights serve him well against left-arm spin, which is a huge front-foot stride, using all his 6ft 4in. He succumbed to Steve O'Keefe at Bellerive by failing to use his full stretch. He did not make that mistake here. In fact, say it soft, because Pietersen really needs no more encouragement than is absolutely necessary, but he looked, at times, a little magnificent, the reach providing the half-volleys, the wrists providing the batspeed. He whisked two not dissimilar balls from North through cover and just forward of square leg for four – the kind of shots that don't just disarm a bowler but mortify him. Where to bowl next?

Pietersen ended the day fifteen runs short of his first hundred in eighteen Tests, Cook with his third hundred in four Tests, Australia having taken three English wickets in their last 241 overs of bowling in this series – about one per new ball. They will have the opportunity to bat again on this blameless pitch, but England could keep them waiting a very long time indeed.

'Australia will fight back today!! No other choice …'

'Patience is the key for Australia and must stick to it and have good body language!!!'

If Ricky Ponting was following Shane Warne on Twitter this morning – and one suspects he enjoys nothing more – he'd have appreciated Warnie's jaunty tone, but perhaps hoped for a little more content. Fight back? Stick to it? Well, yeah. Hey, mate, how about some of that advice on field placement that you offered so helpfully in India?

Alas, Warnie was unable to provide Ponting with further elaboration, being too busy swapping tweets with Piers Morgan and vaunting his underpants (seriously, he has a brand, called Spinners). So Ponting was on his own – and frankly, when a captain has made a first-baller in a total of 245, and seen the opposition rack up 317 for two in reply, leadership must be a very lonely life indeed. The talk today was all of Cook – but spare a thought for the cooked.

As far as his captaincy was concerned, Ponting did not have an altogether bad day. Had Hussey held Trott in the gully and reduced England to 21 for two with Pietersen to come, Australia would have felt themselves well and truly in the game; likewise had one of Cook's early gropings elicited an edge.

When the Australians laid into Trott after lunch from short of a length, they also showed semblances of a scheme which could serve them well this series. Trott plays the hook in the two minds of a smoker who can't quite decide whether to give up: he knows it is bad for him, but also that there is a packet in a kitchen drawer. He should either renounce it, like Steve Waugh, or learn discretion, like … well … Cook.

Even late in the day, Ponting set what for him were some original fields, including a screen of three catchers at intermediate distance on the off when Cook faced North, when there was just the chance he would drive tiredly. But what can you do as captain if you set an off-side field, and the bowler serves up a half-volley on leg stump, or if your allegedly economical left-arm spinner keeps dragging the ball down on a ground with square boundaries so short? Tweet for your life, and don't all answer at once.

Nor, it must be said, is this one of the more naturally mobile Australian sides. Katich jogged after a three down the ground during the afternoon, handicapped by his aching Achilles tendon, at not much greater pace than he showed between wickets yesterday. Watson, too, stands at slip for a reason, because when he chases the ball he resembles a circus strongman who has borrowed a unicycle from one of the clowns. He caught up with a flick to leg of Pietersen's on the boundary under the Chappell Stands today only to find he had conceded an all-run four. Coming on to the field after tea as Australia's best-paid thirteenth man, Mitchell Johnson dived headlong after a ball that had comfortably beaten him to the mid-off boundary – it looked almost like an act of deliberate self-harm.

It was enough to make a captain tear his hair out, were that hair not itself quite expensive. A man who turns thirty-six in two weeks might almost be wondering how much longer he can go round like this. To his credit, Ponting has kept all such thoughts to himself. He still looks like a man engaged and absorbed in his task, however gruelling that may sometimes be, and however vicious the criticism. 'Clueless', read one headline after Brisbane; it was by no means the most hostile, merely the shortest.

For most of his career, Ponting has looked younger than his years, fresh-faced, nearly cherubic. The decades, and maybe cares too, have caught up with him. It is a leathery, stubbly face that peers from beneath his weathered baggy green, which itself is in conspicuous contrast to the bottle-green bonnets of his younger comrades. Eschewing the sunglasses that this Australian team would no sooner go without than would the Rat Pack, he is now a figure who could have stepped from the 1950s. Ricky? Surely he is overdue redesignation as Richard Ponting.

Ponting was a savvy enough cricketer to see change coming. In Matthew Hayden's new autobiography, he recounts a remark of his captain in the Australian slip cordon at the SCG in 2008 as India piled up a 500-plus score. Suddenly, sotto voce, to nobody in particular, Ponting said: 'So this is life without Warnie.' It was not a complaint, or even a sigh of resignation – just an empirical observation. Yes, life had changed. Yes, things would be different in future. Ponting would adapt – he would have to.

In fact, Australia won that Test, to reassure themselves. But they lost the next: the first defeat in which the coach and more than half the team had played. Later that year they gave up the Border-Gavaskar Trophy; a year later they surrendered the Ashes. As the trophy cabinet at Cricket Australia has taken on an antique look, Ponting has grown more grizzled and gritty.

Ponting has looked undignified in this series only when he has aped old Australian behaviours, like chuntering around umpires, and singling out individual opponents: he may never live down describing Cook before the series as 'hanging on by the skin of his teeth'. But lambasting him for being an insufficiently aggressive captain is a little like complaining that he is not taller.

It is Ponting's misfortune to be effectively repeating Allan Border's captaincy career in reverse. Border inherited a poor team and left it on the brink of greatness; Ponting has watched a great team grow ordinary around him. But it has not been for want of trying. There he was throughout the brutally hot afternoon, even at the end, throwing himself around at short mid-wicket, shuffling his fielders, consorting with his bowlers, desperate but not despairing. As stumps were drawn, he walked unselfconsciously to the head of his tired team and led them off as unit: they had struggled but would not straggle.

About twenty minutes later, with the ground empty, a suited Warne descended from his commentary eyrie to kick an Australian rules football around with members of the Channel Nine camera crew. Maybe even he had run short of opinions. Ponting does not have that option.

Kevin Pietersen made a chanceless double hundred today, England's first for six whole days. Then it rained, long and persistently enough to scotch the session after tea. On which of the two events is more significant in the context of the Second Test, the outcome of this Ashes series may hinge. England were 306 runs ahead of Australia with six wickets in hand at the premature close, but there is the chance of further thunderstorms. As far as the hosts are concerned, they cannot be too Biblical.

Pietersen's undefeated 213 featured today only one very minor flutter, when Harris insisted on referring an lbw appeal in the morning's fourth over; the batsman was then 91. It was perhaps for the sheer novelty of having something else to think about other than Pietersen's weight of stroke and level of intent, and quickly dismissed.

The ursine Harris, who continued barrelling through the crease all day, also tested Pietersen with a couple of early bouncers, the first of which descended safely from the slice, the second causing the batsman to pirouette out of danger. Other than that, Pietersen cast a lengthening shadow over bowlers and fielders alike, tackling Ponting's seven-two dispositions by quickstepping to flick through the untenanted on, carving up the callow Doherty, the flagging Siddle and the failing Bollinger at will. He used every stroke in his repertoire, explored every quadrant of the field, and restored his Test average to within a whisker of the 50 below which it fell for the first time a year ago. This was only his second Test hundred since the ECB busted him to the ranks at the end of 2008 – but he is not finished yet.

England resumed this morning with Cook and Pietersen in harness, Cook having now batted on seven of the eight days of the series, Pietersen ominously threatening parallel permanence. The crowd were subdued – quite possibly hung over too. After forty-five hard-charging minutes, Harris seamed one back through Cook's defence, and Haddin doubled back to snare the inside edge. Haddin had made a point of shaking Cook's hand at stumps the previous evening – his were appropriate hands for the batsman's seven-and-a-quarter-hour 148 to end in.

Siddle could not obtain the same lift, consecutive half-pitchers in his first over arriving at a friendly waist height. Pietersen pulled both majestically, like baseball grounders, and they bisected boundary fielders who hardly had time to move. The only movement Siddle obtained today was after the ball passed the bat, one veering so violently that Haddin could only brush it with the tips of his gloves as it sped to the long-leg boundary.

Bollinger, meanwhile, looked to be running in faster than he was bowling, and at unjustifiable length. Belonging to the Australian park cricket condition of playing cricket to get fit rather than getting fit to play cricket, he has been found short of a gallop here, and given away no fewer than eighteen boundaries. On present indications, his will be a brief international career, if not so brief as Xavier Doherty's.

Each time an English batsman hit a boundary, the big screen overlooking the Hill flashed up the smiling face of Shane Warne, flogging a new fast food item a little less healthy than a deep-fried doner kebab; it also offered a periodic reminder of the chief reason for Australia's toils. Pietersen found Doherty tasty indeed, while Paul Collingwood also tucked in with relish. The captaincy was average. The fielding was average to terrible. The scenario was just terrible. Mitchell Johnson came on as a substitute again, for the visibly limping Katich, and started whirling his arms, seemingly perchance to bowl. A little part of him must have been just a tiny bit happy that he didn't have to.

After lunch, Watson found a hint of reverse swing, and brought one into Collingwood, back when he should have been forward. But the crucified looks exchanged when Pietersen (140) slashed wide of North's right hand at gully implied a team feeling itself at odds with the fates. Pietersen marched on, moving into the ball with predatory intent, content to defend only when every possibility for attack was categorically denied him.

In Ian Bell, Pietersen found the perfect foil in a stand of 99 at four an over. Bell still looks like a Lego figurine, his stroke production seemingly the outcome of various plastic pivots and swivels. This does mean, however, that he seldom mistimes or tries to hit too hard. When the ball is in the slot, it is cover-driven sweetly. When it is short outside off, it is cut unerringly. He has none of Pietersen's originality, but wouldn't keep next man in on tenterhooks like his team-mate either – his only mannerism is fiddling with the shoulders of his shirts, as though his tailor uses too much starch. Other than that, he provides England with the security at number six that North signally does not.

Rain began to descend at tea. It fell not heavily but sufficiently and, for Australia, relievingly. Pretty soon there were covers on the centre, videos on the big screen and several damp games of cricket on the Hill; the weather may yet have the final word here. But even if it does, some long, weighty and rather intimidating words have already been uttered.