Report: day two | Reaction | Scoreboard | Over-by-over | Debate | Weblog
Early into the second hour of the second day of this opening Ashes Test there had been a small but encouraging sign that England may have been under the cosh but they weren’t necessarily going to abjectly lie down and die - a thought that had begun to cross the minds of their supporters.
The scoreboard in Brisbane was reading 393 for three, the fourth-wicket stand between Ricky Ponting and Mike Hussey was approaching 200, and England looked like a team that had not so much run out of ideas as never had any in the first place.
Then Andrew Strauss suddenly took off from slip on a run around the ring of fielders and geed each of them up in turn by throwing the ball at them hard and demanding it back. It was just the sort of motivational support Andrew Flintoff, who beat Strauss to the England captaincy for this tour, had asked for from his deputy before they ever left home.
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And to an extent it worked. Soon after that, England claimed their first wicket of the day and the second session. When they took four wickets for 101, it was much their best of the match, even if it was too little too late as Australia eventually closed at four o’clock local time on a score of 602 for nine declared.
But Flintoff won’t be thanking Strauss for the stroke the England opener got out to 11 overs before the close. The Australians had identified Strauss as the key wicket at the top of the English order: in the absence of Marcus Trescothick and Michael Vaughan, he represented the experience around which the youthful Alastair Cook and Ian Bell would look to play.
Strauss also had a duty, too, to keep out Glenn McGrath, in his first Test for a year.
Instead, in McGrath’s third over, and with himself and Cook coping reasonably well against the new ball, Strauss launched a casual pull to a ball outside off stump and skewed it high into the leg side, where Mike Hussey was placed for this favourite Strauss stroke.
The ball was in the air so long that Hussey, positioned at midwicket, and Brett Lee, charging up from fine leg, both got to the ball in time. Hussey got the catch, Lee a gash on the knee from Hussey’s spikes.
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Those whose experience of Ashes cricket pre-dates the 2005 vintage may have heard this before but once the breach was made the Australians were irresistible. Very next ball, McGrath produced a jaffa from round the wicket to Cook, who edged a regulation catch to Shane Warne at second slip.
Five overs later, Stuart Clark, brought on to bowl while Lee had his knee repaired, had Paul Collingwood caught behind off a stroke that betrayed Collingwood’s experience.
Ian Bell and Kevin Pietersen battled through to stumps in the Gabba’s half-shadows to allow England to dream of fighting back and scraping through the next three days for a draw. But it is a pipedream.
England, as we know, are a good side. But, as they have shown in this match, they make too many basic errors of judgement, of the sort Strauss committed, to survive against opponents of the calibre of Australia. And Shane Warne has so far only bowled one over.
Read Simon Wilde’s close of play report of the third day from 8am tomorrow