Ashes 2011 (13 page)

In all the pre-Ashes soundings among former Australian greats, even those involving a pro forma prediction of 5–0, there was one common denominator. Whenever an opinion was sought about the identity of England's key player of the coming summer, the answer came back the same: the kp was KP.

Part of this was probably general ignorance. Australians have grown used to letting English cricket look after itself. Some pommy bloke making runs? Some promising new bowler? Yeah, well … wait till they get out here. But Kevin Pietersen? Hard to forget him getting the better of Australia at the Oval in 2005; hard to forget Australia getting the better of him at Adelaide in 2006. Looks a bit of a show pony, but Warnie likes him – that's gotta count for something.

It's still arguable that Australians in underestimating England overestimate Pietersen: he forms part of a more consistent and uniformly competent visiting unit than that which he joined. But, especially after today, you will never convince those grudging Australian admirers otherwise. His undefeated 213 was Pietersen
in posse, in esse
and in total command – of himself, not least of all.

That meant it was not quite the Pietersen that Australians first saw. He offended no orthodoxies. He cut no capers. He met Xavier Doherty with a defensive bat so doornail dead and plumb-line straight that it bordered on parody, although it wasn't – this was meaningful deliberation. At last. He'd worked it out at last. To think, after all his travails against it, that left-arm spin was
this
easy to play.

When Pietersen then went after Doherty – indeed, took 57 from his 58 deliveries, including nine fours and a six – it was hard to avoid the sensation that the hapless Tasmanian was paying for Pietersen's previous indignities at the hands of other members of the genre. That Ponting entrusted North with eighteen overs to Doherty's twenty-four suggests that the ninth Australian post-Warne spinner is about to go from being a Test cricketer to part of the answer to a trivia question.

All the same, Australians saw again the qualities in Pietersen that first caused them discomfiture. A Pietersen playing soberly is still like a conventional batsman spontaneously brainstorming. Thanks to wrists that rotate like gimbals, he scores in more areas of the field than perhaps any other contemporary batsman. Most wagon wheels tell you not much. Batsmen score in different directions: who knew? But Pietersen's formed almost a complete asterisk. He does not have one sweep, for instance, but many. He swung Doherty as fine as forty degrees to square leg, then North as much as thirty degrees in front, all along the ground.

This latter shot, played in the over before lunch and taking England's lead to 200, was followed by a similarly confounding boundary that split Bollinger and Hussey, meant to be protecting the leg-side boundary, but each aborting approaching the ball out of consideration for the other – commendable from an occupational health and safety point of view, but evidence of the confusion and dismay an in-form Pietersen can spread.

When Doherty resumed to Pietersen after lunch, it was with six men deep: Siddle at deep mid-on, Watson deep mid-off, North deep mid-wicket, Bollinger deep backward square, Harris deep point, and Ponting deep trouble. They were brought in as Pietersen's double-hundred loomed, but he was not to be denied, dropping to his knee as he completed the climactic single as though about to receive the Order of the Garter on the spot.

Pietersen's boldness and ingenuity was brought to the fore now and again when he advanced on both Bollinger and Siddle to pick them off through the leg side from off and middle. But a subtler feature was Pietersen's strength straight: more than 30 per cent of his runs were acquired in the 'V' demarcated by mid-off and mid-on, often by no more than leaning on the ball and harnessing the transference of his weight as propulsion for the stroke. When the ball ducked around a little after lunch, his perpendicular bat and front-foot launch stood him in good stead.

One is never permitted to speak solely of Pietersen the batsman. No member of the current England team is the subject of more cod psychology. Twenty-eight innings without a Test hundred has left plentiful opportunities for sentiments like 'he needs to feel loved', as though this is a breakthrough insight about Pietersen rather than an embarrassing channelling of Oprah.

It's true that Pietersen has caused England team-mates to sigh with exasperation almost as often as to gasp in astonishment. Just over three years ago, for example, he promised that his team would 'humiliate' Australia in the World Twenty20, only for the promise to boomerang. 'Kevin's obviously Kevin,' was Paul Collingwood's Gertrude Stein-esque explanation, amid sage nodding. Born to tweet, he has, of course, tested the limits of the ECB's social media policies in Adelaide.

Yet Pietersen's analysts sometimes seem to reveal as much about themselves as their analysand. John Buchanan and Shane Warne both addressed themselves to his status in the England line-up before the series, Buchanan opining that he was potentially a 'major problem' where England's 'strength and unity' were involved, Warne that he was being treated as 'a bit of an outcast': 'KP might be the walking ego with the way he struts around, and sometimes he is unpopular with his own team-mates, and he can rub people up the wrong way. But he has to be made to feel important and like he is the man. If he feels like that, he will give you everything.' It was the bureaucrat ruminating about the presence of the occasionally disruptive virtuoso, the occasionally disruptive virtuoso raging against bureaucracy. It sounded like Buchanan talking about Warne, and Warne talking about … well, Warne.

Does any of this matter? There is a cast of mind that thinks every cricket team must harmonise like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, that all traits of individuality must be effaced for the sake of a uniform whole. Cricket – and team sports in general – are more complicated. In any event, what today attests is that Pietersen's most significant psychological impact this summer will not be on his own team but on the Australians. They saw today coming – perhaps more clearly than the English.

England stand on the brink of a famous victory in the Second Test at Adelaide Oval. But the brink lies beneath an inky vault of cloud, storm warnings for tomorrow likely to render the game's final day a stop-start affair – assuming it starts at all.

At stumps tonight, Australia were 138 runs from making England bat again, with six wickets remaining, Michael Clarke, after his best score in thirteen Test innings, having succumbed to the day's very last ball, turning a high-bouncing delivery from Kevin Pietersen to short leg Alastair Cook. Pietersen and Cook had already shared the match's highest partnership; they may well remember this instant better. Four years ago, Australia raced time to win here, and beat both England and the clock. Now the roles are reversed – as they are in so many other respects in this series.

Resuming after yesterday's early finish due to rain, Pietersen drove the day's second ball to the cover fence with a flourish. 'As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted …' it seemed to announce. England carried on another forty minutes and eleven overs, hastily adding another 69, losing Pietersen for his best Test score to perhaps the first shot he premeditated, but rubbing their ascendancy in just a little deeper. Bell played the shots of the day, and some of the best of the series, in his unbeaten innings: a double-fisted forehand over cover off Siddle; an exquisitely fine reverse-sweep for four and a imperious lofted drive for six off the seemingly doomed Doherty. The sole impediment to their breezy progress was a failure of the River End scoreboard to dissolve to white from its hamburger advertisement – perhaps one day the burger advertisements will be permanent and players will have to play on regardless. Australia's nadir was reached when Prior's top-edged sweep from Doherty fell safely between Ponting and North, who decided individually that the other could take the catch and chose effectively that neither would.

Strauss's declaration left Australia 375 in arrears with most of two days to play, weather permitting. The Test match improved for Katich when he reached the other end for the first time – three days after starting, as it were. But with his aching Achilles tendon, he moved between the wickets like an elderly man trying out new orthotics. Having brought the injury into the game, he was not entitled to a runner under Law 2.1 (a), even if the Australians might reasonably have pointed out that Marylebone's statutes are silent on the subject of Zimmer frames.

Swann's arrival for the tenth over then involved what might have been taken for a meeting on a building site, with four hard-hatted figures in close proximity: batsman, short leg, silly point, keeper. In a cap, first slip Collingwood looked as though he was living a little dangerously. Australia's relatively straightforward progress to that point abruptly became a challenge. Compared to Swann, previous English spinners have barely revolved the ball at all; with the momentum of his double-whirling arms, he gives it a mighty rip, and the ball leaves his hand seething with spin.

Katich sent a leading edge just beyond Strauss's reach at short cover. Both batsmen then paused in their parlay of a run: had Anderson directed his throw to the striker's rather than the non-striker's end, Watson (25) might well have come up short. Watson's stand-up sweep at the next ball then sent a bat-pad chance looping over Bell at silly point. There were half a dozen half-chances in the session – which, in cricket currency, unfortunately for England, does not translate as three chances. But they promised a lot for the afternoon, as did the darkening footmarks outside a right-hander's off stump, loosened by Bollinger's front footfall. Katich was duly caught behind lunging at the second ball after the break.

This brought Ponting to the wicket, on not just a pair but a king pair. I could get a king pair in a Test; so could you. Swann went past his outside edge at once, turning crimson with suppressed excitement, and Australia's captain was kept waiting on a pair for a dozen deliveries. He then swept a ball from outside the off stump for four, a resounding but not necessarily a reassuring shot, for in his 150 Tests it is one he has seldom played. The next ball did not deviate far from the straight, Ponting played towards mid-on, and Collingwood scooped at slip, inches from the grass – he rose, with his teammates, performing transports of delight.

Watson looked in his usual reasonable fettle before nicking a ball from Finn that held its line. What has been to this stage treated as impressive consistency in Watson's record is becoming increasingly problematic. In thirty innings since his restoration to the Australian team as an ersatz opener, he has fallen on seventeen occasions between 30 and 65, and progressed further only five times. And people thought John Howard was stuck in the 50s …

Clarke found the right moment and occasion to attain something like his best form, justifying his pre-match bullishness. His footwork to Swann was sparkling. He never allowed Anderson to settle, and he survived Broad, in whom has clearly been vested responsibility for roughing him up. At one stage, he struck four boundaries in eight balls, all of them legitimate disposals of errant deliveries. England thought themselves entitled to celebrate when a ball from Swann looped to slip after worming its way between bat and pad, but Clarke (69) referred promptly and pooped the party – the replay was inconclusive.

Either side of fifty-seven minutes lost to a squall, the half-chances continued their non-accumulating occurrence. Clarke was 72 when he steered another from Swann into Cook's knee at short leg. The fielder did not flinch, but nor did he really move, and the ball dropped safely amid anguished glances. Hussey was 27 when he drove out of the rough just wide of Anderson at slip. Collingwood might have caught it – had he not been bowling at the time. Hussey was 41 when his miscued sweep wafted across the face of the stumps but spun wide.

It was looking very like Australia would begin the last day with their fourth-wicket pair still in harness, when Strauss threw the ball to Pietersen, who had not taken a Test wicket since July 2008 – after thirty-four consecutive overs from Swann, it was an unexpected gambit, and a smart one. Like Watson, Clarke has a reputation for being vulnerable around breaks, and his fall to the last delivery of the penultimate day at Edgbaston in 2005 may even, at a stretch, be said to have cost Australia the Ashes.

Pietersen's eighth delivery turned, bounced, and emerged from a flurry of bat, pad and body, whereupon Cook took the catch, and umpire Tony Hill declined to adjudicate. This time it was England's turn to refer promptly – in fact, in an impressive act of synchronised signalling, virtually every member of the fielding side seemed to be forming the 'T' symbol. When the replay confirmed the presence of an edge, England drew to the brink of its brink. The final step awaits.

Just before 4 p.m. at the Adelaide Oval today, there was a sight for the ages. It was quite dark. Rain-bearing clouds were progressing slowly across the skies, ominous as zeppelins. Below, a captain of England was trying to disabuse two umpires of their conviction that the light was too poor to permit a continuance of play in an Ashes Test. Two Australian batsmen, meanwhile, were already three-quarters of the way to the boundary gate, refusing to look over their shoulders in case their rival had his way.

The Ashes of 2010–11 remain nil-all. If the weather warning is to be believed, that scoreline might still apply at the end of this match. In the interim, the aforementioned events are worthy of remark. Even five years ago when England restored Ashes parity after a long interval, the prevailing emotion was one of blessedness.
Is It Cowardly to Pray for Rain?
was the title of Rob Smyth's wonderfully droll retelling of the series, inspired by the weather at the Oval rather than the wickets. The answer was: yes, a bit. But, well, you know …