To anyone watching closely as Australia held their last practice session in and around the nets at the Gabba before yesterday’s triumphant opening to the Ashes series by the home team, it was obvious that Ricky Ponting was honed to the minute like a thoroughbred for the biggest race of his life.
Just before he faced the media for the umpteenth time in the past two weeks, the home captain spent some 20 minutes, without a second’s break, diving and scrabbling with astonishing agility and amazing hand-eye co-ordination as Australia’s American fielding coach, Mike Young, hurled a hard rubber cricket ball at a plastic step from which the ball rebounded at all angles. Ponting never fumbled, never looked like missing a catch.
England felt the full impact of his intense preparation, physical sharpness, natural skill and profound determination to gain the earliest possible revenge for last year’s defeat as he scored his ninth hundred in Australia’s past 12 Tests.
Mike Hussey, the other run machine during Australia’s impeccable run since underestimating Michael Vaughan’s team last year, maintained his form no less impressively, presenting the full face of his bat in an outstanding technical display at a time when England were bowling far better than in a dreadful morning session. By the close, Ponting and Hussey, the fourth-wicket pair, had already added 148 together.
A lost toss, a feeble start by Stephen Harmison and Ponting’s quick-footed brilliance combined to bury any chance that the holders of the Ashes will win this first Test. That is not yet to say that the urn will necessarily change hands, nor even that England will lose after a first day that was just about as bad for them as could be, but they will have to bat extraordinarily well on Shane Warne’s favourite playground to avoid defeat.
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If Kevin Pietersen could turn and bounce the ball threateningly, as he did at times during his longest spell in Test cricket, Warne will be a far bigger and more consistent threat.
Andrew Flintoff, in his six short spells head and shoulders above the other fast bowlers for accuracy, speed and menace, was the only one to draw inspiration from an occasion as big as this. Ashley Giles played his part with proper professionalism on his return to first-class cricket 11 months after his last match, in Faisalabad, but the rest had a day to forget.
Harmison started the series like a nervous schoolboy, aiming his first ball so wide of the off stump that Flintoff fielded it at second slip, a sonorous echo of previous bad starts by England: the long hop by Phillip DeFreitas to Michael Slater here in 1994 and Vaughan’s unaccountable misfield of the first ball four years ago.
Matthew Hoggard got none of the swing with the first new ball that he did in the evening with the second, again betraying an excess of tension, and James Anderson bowled too many short balls all day. Only briefly, during the early afternoon when he helped his captain to apply some consistent pressure on Ponting and Damien Martyn, did he look like making up for the absence of Simon Jones, or indeed look a better bet than Sajid Mahmood, but it is a fair bet, alas, that his Lancashire colleague would have been just as expensive. Anderson did bowl one of the few balls to get past Ponting, one that cut back between bat and pad, but his form and rhythm still seems to come and go like clouds on a windy day.
Harmison’s, however, was by far the more significant failure. Bowling fast and straight at his own batsmen in the nets, as he had in Adelaide after withdrawing from the match against South Australia at the last moment, was, as everyone knew, the wrong preparation for being entrusted with the new ball at the moment when half the world seemed to be watching him. He produced a much-improved spell in midafternoon to give the leonine Flintoff the support he needed, but by then it was surely too late, for this match at least.
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Justin Langer was the batsman who made the opening statement, like a ministerial preliminary on some grave matter of State for which the nation has been waiting, before the main speech from Prime Minister Ponting. While Matthew Hayden attempted to lay a foundation for a repeat of the big innings he played here four years ago, when he and Ponting made centuries and Australia reached 364 for two on the first day, Langer cut and pulled like a man possessed. He scored 37 of the 50 rattled up in the first 62 balls and was 68 not out by lunch, having fed off a generous diet of long hops and half-volleys.
Flintoff averted wholesale disaster by having Hayden caught at second slip from a ball on his off stump that bounced and left him a fraction. His second burst of one for eight in four overs was the one piece of really commanding bowling all day and meant that Ponting was properly tested at first. But at the start of each session England began loosely. Seventeen runs came from the first three overs, 23 from the first three after lunch and 12 from an experimental over by Ian Bell after tea.
Although Langer died by the sword that he had wielded with such relish in his innings of only 29 overs, cutting Flintoff to Pietersen at cover point, Martyn calmly played himself in and had hit not a single one of his flashy off-side strokes until, drawing back to cut a ball from Giles that was barely short, he was defeated by the bounce and caught at slip.
That was the last of England’s success, although when Ponting was 72 he was lucky not to be given out leg-before, sweeping at a ball of full length from Giles that pitched on the stumps and would have hit.
Only three other men, Clyde Walcott, with ten centuries in 12 Tests, and Don Bradman and Sunil Gavaskar, with nine in 12, have enjoyed so prolific a run as Australia’s delighted captain.