Ashes 2011

by Gideon Haigh

  A fill-in composed of Chris Tremlett's bowling and Tim Bresnan's batting would fit the bill adequately, but it doesn't work that way: Australia must wish similarly for a combination of Doug Bollinger's bowling with Mitchell Johnson's fitness. Tremlett bowls the tighter lines, obtains the greater bounce and reverse swing, but he is a more natural replacement for Steve Finn; Bresnan has the more recent international experience, is generally considered the sounder temperament, and looks a natural to push into the fabled Fremantle Doctor, the cooling afternoon breeze that blows in off the sea. If England do pick Tremlett, it suggests they are very confident indeed.

  Not that they wouldn't have reason to be. Since Peter Siddle took six for 54 on the rubber's first day, Australia have been outplayed by growing degrees: having taken a hat-trick on his twenty-sixth birthday, Siddle is yet to claim a wicket in his twenty-seventh year. Only Michael Hussey and Brad Haddin have made good with the bat, repeating their Gabba partnership in a minor key at Adelaide Oval. Shane Watson, Michael Clarke and the captain himself have much to prove with the bat; Ben Hilfenhaus has ample room for improvement with the ball.

  As for the newbie, Michael is very much a boutique Beer, as it were. This time twelve months ago, the tenth bowler to assume Shane Warne's mantle in less than four years was trundling away for the great man's old club of St Kilda, kept out of the state side by Bryce McGain and Jon Holland. In winter, Beer quit his Melbourne job with Puma, dragged his left-arm orthodox kitbag across the Nullarbor Plain, and winkled out five Englishmen at the WACA Ground in October's tour match while conceding 207 runs – which by recent standards of Australian slow bowling qualifies him as a veritable destroyer. Mickey Arthur, now coach of Western Australia, rates him highly, Beer's height (6ft 1) conducing to bounce, his outgoing temperament suggesting resilience. Shane Warne lifted his gaze from Liz Hurley's cleavage long enough to bless the promotion. Too few have actually seen Beer bowl to differ.

  Too many saw Mitchell Johnson bowl at Brisbane to believe that Australia would dare pick him again, but the pre-match vibe is that they just might. His record in Perth is impressive: on the right sort of pitch, with a calm domestic environment, an auspicious horoscope and a favourable alignment of the planets, he might yet cause surprises. At the moment, all the same, Johnson is like the American economy: patchy and frail despite repeated stimulus schemes and short-term fixes. If chosen, the first few overs may tell.

  Certain to play are the New South Welshmen Steve Smith and Phil Hughes, who have succeeded the underperforming Marcus North and the overtaxed Simon Katich. Both are exciting cricketers who performed passably for Australia A three weeks ago; Hughes is still, perhaps, a little too exciting for his own and the next man in's good. Both would have hoped to play in this series. Neither would have expected their opportunities to arise so soon.

  Otherwise, even Australian rhetoric, at which they used to excel, is not what it was. Usually a forum of robust self-assertion, Ponting's most recent column in The Australian was a diffident one. Of Adelaide he commented: 'If we had held our chances here and there and been able to sustain pressure for slightly longer periods, I think things could have been different.' Of Perth he added: 'We've got to make sure we believe in each other and what we are doing is right. If we do that I honestly believe a win is just around the corner for us.'

  'If', 'could', 'think', 'believe', 'around the corner' – assuming these speech balloons correlated to thought bubbles, Ponting is channelling the same self-delusion and wishful thinking that for so long characterised English cricket. He will need to clear his conglomerated mind this week if he is to steer Australia back into the series.

  16 DECEMBER 2010

  Day 1

  Close of play: England 1st innings 29–0

  (AJ Strauss 12*, AN Cook 17*, 12 overs)

  The most-discussed twenty-two yards of turf in Australia and the country's most-debated home line-up in years today both promised more than they delivered in the Third Test at Perth: on both counts, Australia was the loser.

  Loaded to the gunwales with pace bowling in the expectation of a pitch in the old WACA tradition, Australia were sent in and scuttled by an England team that made up for what the pitch did not actually provide by disciplined line and smart catching.

  As in the Second Test, Australia's middle and lower order did its best. Having accumulated 243 through its last seven wickets at Adelaide, the team found 232 among its last six here. The trouble was that the starting point was barely improved. Two for three at Adelaide was 36 for four here. At the close of the first day in Adelaide, England were 244 in arrears with all their wickets intact; here the difference is 239. Good teams can recover from such early misadventures; this is not a good team, or at least is not playing like one at present.

  'The finest, most fragile area of grass known to sports,' says Joseph O'Neill of cricket pitches in his acclaimed novel Netherland. 'For all its apparent artificiality,' he notes, 'cricket is a game in nature.' Studying this pitch and the reactions to it in the prelude to the Third Test has, indeed, been a little like watching a wildlife documentary.

  Phil Hughes summed up initial responses when he asked if curator Cam Sutherland would be giving it another cut; West Australian coach Mickey Arthur countered that visitors should not approach it through green-tinted spectacles. From day to day, according to watering, weather, fancy and folklore, the surface seemed to be greening and yellowing before onlookers' eyes.

  It certainly had some eye-catching qualities. Although the pitch is the same as was used for the Test against the West Indies last year, the grass is of a finer quality than usual. But recent heatwave conditions have baked it hard, and the promise of bounce was hard to resist. The additional consideration was that, with their high clay content, pitches here are inclined to crack, sometimes dramatically, like crazy paving. During a 194-over fiasco here in 1993, the cracks were so wide that batsmen seemed to disappear down them; a pitch earlier this season in a state Second XI game looked like the junction of tectonic plates. Yet they caused no concern whatever when South Africa successfully overhauled 414 in the fourth innings two years ago.

  Both teams invested accordingly. Australia became the Team With No Beer by excluding their specialist left-arm spinner; England picked Chris Tremlett ahead of Tim Bresnan for his additional 8 inches of height and 5mph of speed, then committed themselves by inserting their opponents. It paid off quickly.

  The last ball of Anderson's first over glanced Watson's thigh pad on the way to fine leg, only for Prior to take a levitating left-handed catch – a snare that deserved a wicket and almost got one when the appeal was upheld by Doctrove, until the referral was upheld by Aleem Dar. The last ball of Tremlett's first over then brooked no argument, seaming back through Hughes's all-too-permeable defence to clip the top of off.

  In Anderson's third over, Strauss at first slip could not quite hang in the air long enough to control a slash from Watson (2) that slapped into his upstretched left hand. But Anderson had to wait only four further deliveries for a wicket when Collingwood at third slip flew high to his right to catch Ponting's hard-handed edge. Again Australia's captain played a ball the length of which suggested he could comfortably have left.

  Anderson we knew of. Tremlett? Judging by his physique, he has been charged by God to bowl fast. No wonder his erstwhile county captain Shane Warne once said he had the potential to be 'the number one bowler in the world'. He looks like he could have stepped out of an electronic game: 6ft 7in tall, sculpted jaw, prominent cheekbones, broad shoulders tapering to a minimal waist.

  Obstacles to his progress have been temperamental: he purportedly makes Bambi look like Jon Bon Jovi. In hindsight, his haymaker to break Anderson's rib at England's pre-tour boot camp was poor preparation but a good omen. Tremlett might have bowled a couple of feet fuller at times, but his spell of 6–1–17–2 could otherwise hardly have been improved. His prize wicket of Clarke, again skittish, again fending away from his body, was Prior's 100th Test catch. />
  After an hour, Australia were 33 for three. They eked fifty from 133 deliveries, 110 of them scoreless. Hussey raised a cheer when he hooked Finn for six, as fine as Roy Fredericks did Dennis Lillee thirty-five years ago, but this was a solitary flare rather than Fredericks-style pyrotechnics. Finn trapped Watson with a surprise yorker, and England had penetrated to Australia's all-rounders in an hour and a half.

  Was it the pitch? The toss? The occasion? The bowling was keen, the catching sure. The batting was simply poor, below Test class, as though Australia had spent so long fantasising of slapping down their bowling full house that they'd given no thought to England's three of a kind. It got worse too. One day, Smith could make a handy Test number six – but not, quite, yet. Pushed back by Tremlett's short ball, he was unprepared for the fuller follow-up. Shortly after lunch, Australia were even more poorly placed than they had been at the corresponding stage at Adelaide Oval.

  For the third consecutive Test, Hussey and Haddin provided the choicest Australian batting. Having looked on his last legs just six weeks ago, Hussey could play for another six years on his present form. Haddin greeted the arrival of Swann at 2 p.m. by lifting him over mid-off for four and mid-on for six. With a slash over gully from Finn, one of three boundaries in a ragged over, Hussey raised his own half-century in 98 balls.

  Just when the partnership had percolated for 62 runs from 79 deliveries, Swann turned one past a startled Hussey prod and, acting on the rumour of an edge, successfully sought a referral over the head of the impassive Doctrove, whose decisions these days look increasingly like merely bases for on-going negotiation. Johnson used the sweep to good advantage against Swann, a six leaving his bat with a resonant 'clop' in addition to eight boundaries. Only stattos were disappointed by Johnson's runs, their being the first by a number eight batsman in this series. The good it could have done him was seen in his overs before the close, where he shaped a couple of balls away from England's openers, as he hadn't in Brisbane.

  But watching Johnson, Siddle and Hilfenhaus add 67 for the last two wickets from 97 deliveries, harnessing the pace and handling the bounce quite easily, one wondered how Australia had gone so badly astray in the morning. And there were few alarms as Strauss and Cook guided England through the final fifty minutes, Cook even registering a fifth six in sixty-two Tests, with a wind-assisted up-and-under over third man. Without their own assistance from the elements, Australia are going to have to work this Test out themselves.

  16 DECEMBER 2010

  THE WACA

  Perthabad

  Perth is the city farthest from any other city in the world; its cricket ground is, proverbially, the one whose conditions are among the most different from those of other Test venues. This was meant to be the Test where Australia's local knowledge would count most, and England would be made to feel less like visitors and more like aliens.

  Like so much else about this series, in which the gap between 'plan' and 'execution' is widening to Great Australian Bight proportions, little time had elapsed today before the roles of predator and prey had been reversed, it being Ricky Ponting's team that looked like it had never travelled west of Adelaide, Andrew Strauss's that seemed uncommonly comfortable.

  The prelude to this match had actually been ever-so-slightly odd, with the Australians incanting a mantra of enjoyment. Ricky Ponting spoke glowingly of the renewed energy in his camp lent by the youth of Phil Hughes and Steve Smith. The latter announced that he had been appointed team jester: 'I've been told that I've got to come into the side and be fun. For me, it's about having energy in the field and making sure I'm having fun and making sure everyone else around is having fun, whether it be telling a joke or something like that.'

  'Have fun!!' coach Tim Nielsen enjoined his charges from his Cricket Australia blog. It sounded like a scout troop on a camp where it's rained for a week, everyone has diarrhoea and there is nothing to eat but canned baked beans, but the Akela keeps insisting on another chorus of 'On Top of Old Smokey'. One-nil down in an Ashes series is not a fun scenario; the WACA is not a fun ground, resembling, as it does, an overgrown Portakabin, with official ordinances that proscribe 'hard foam eskies', 'vuvuzelas' and 'racial vilification' in that order.

  Not that there was any hint of the last. On the contrary: with the St George Crosses merging into the red and white of the Vodafone livery, the WACA seemed an almost unrelieved expanse of Englishness, with only the occasional yellow outcrop to interrupt the view. As Australia crumbled, the only fun was among visiting spectators.

  Then there were the selections. For years, Perth's residual reputation for pace and the green sheen on its pitches has led to its being described as a kind of honeytrap for excitable young pacemen, whom it is said to entice to wild and woolly extremes. In fact, it has become, like every first-class pitch around Australia, good for batting, simply harder and a little glossier than most.

  Today it was not a kid tearaway letting enthusiasm get the better of him, but Australia's wise selectors, who chose a team with no fewer than five fast-medium bowlers, relying for its slow bowling on a 21-year-old who has paid 45 runs for each of his first-class wickets. If this match stretches into a fourth and fifth day, that attack may start growing a mite monotonous.

  Finally, on a pitch that then did little more than a Test pitch should on an average first morning, Australia's top order proceeded to make a simply disciplined attack look entirely lethal. It was Bob Simpson, a West Australia Sheffield Shield star in the late 1950s, who is usually credited with the philosophy of batsmanship at the WACA: you protect the stumps, play with either a completely vertical or horizontal bat, and leave on length. Such is the clay in the pitch and the carry to the keeper that most balls can be safely let go; it is the fuller delivery that causes problems.

  This surface is classically hard – so hard that when Brad Haddin stabbed a ball of full length into the ground from Finn after lunch, it bounced over Bell's head at point and still had the impetus to make it to the boundary. But it required nothing to survive that wasn't within the powers of the average Test batsmen – leading one to the uncomfortable conclusion that Australia's, at least at the moment, are falling below that median.

  Hughes may be the first opening batsman to arrive in Test cricket without a front-foot defensive stroke, the absence of which in England last year made his batting look like a combination of a sharkskin suit with a Hawaiian shirt. He has tightened his technique a tad since, but not as much as he should have. To a ball from Tremlett that needed a straight, dead bat, he was playing ambitiously to leg. It was an aggressive shot; it may even have been a fun shot; it wasn't the shot of a Test match opener.

  Perth was where Ponting made his Test debut fifteen years ago, being unlucky to fall four short of what, had the referral system been in place, would have been a hundred. He was consoled at the time that there would be more hundreds, and there have been thirty-nine, but not one in Perth, where he has passed fifty only thrice since. It was here a year ago, in fact, that he experienced the memento mori of being clocked agonisingly on the arm by Kemar Roach as he essayed his pet pull, an episode he has admitted made him think: 'How on earth did I do that?' The question Ponting will have asked himself on failing today was:' Why on earth did I do that?' To the fifth ball of Anderson's third over, the bowler's stock away swinger, Ponting's stroke was a long way from compulsory; it was hard-handed, groping for the ball. It wasn't clear whether Ponting's look of dejection was a response to Collingwood's super-fine catch or his own misbegotten shot.

  Again this summer, Clarke cut an anxious figure for a batsman with a Test average six months ago of 52, his only scoring shot a speculative cut just wide of gully's left hand. Again, like his captain, he seemed overeager to lay bat on ball, offering a crooked defensive bat to a ball requiring no more than a regulation leave.

  Watson was happy to leave, as is his wont: he scored from only nine of his forty deliveries faced, and would have offered a shot at few more. He was caught, instead, flat-
footed, by the surprise fuller delivery. Between Tests, Finn swapped his schoolboy cowlick for something a little more streamlined and spiky; although expensive today and down a little on pace, he shows parallel signs of maturing as a bowler.

  From this point, the innings represented only a negotiation on the scale of the debacle. Although the lower echelons fought hard, wickets fell at intervals congenial to England, and when Australia's bowlers had a dozen overs at Strauss and Cook late in the day they were fast, aggressive and too short – England's captain and vice-captain left with aplomb. They already appeared comfortable, settled, grooved. It was Ponting who vanished into the shadows of the players' pavilion looking like a stranger in town.

  17 December 2010

  Day 2

  Close of play: Australia 2nd innings 119–3

  (SR Watson 61*, MEK Hussey 24*, 33 overs)

  Were Mitchell Johnson a racehorse, they would never stop swabbing him. Were he a Pakistani, his performances would be under more or less constant scrutiny. So exhilarating one day; so execrable the next. Two weeks ago, he looked to be in more pieces than Humpty Dumpty. Yet Australia have succeeded where all the king's horses and all the king's men failed, for today he bounced his country back into the Ashes of 2010–11 in two explosive spells.

  In nine overs before lunch, Johnson unseated four batsmen for 20 runs; in eight after the interval, he winkled out another two for 14. You need to read both the runs and the wickets too. Johnson is by reputation penetrative and profligate – these analyses were in the Glenn McGrath or Curtly Ambrose category, taking everything, leaving nothing.