FORCES greater than themselves are propelling the England team towards the Ashes. There are still 98 overs to be bowled on the final day of the series and it is possible that Australia will bowl out England sufficiently quickly today to give themselves a chance of a fourth-innings run chase, but the weather has conspired to give the home team every possible assistance since Michael Vaughan won the toss on Thursday.
They batted on an ideal cricket pitch in blissful sunshine for four sessions and bowled in an almost relentless murk yesterday that helped Andrew Flintoff and Matthew Hoggard, brilliantly exploiting conditions that had suddenly become ideal for seam bowling, to take Australia’s last seven wickets for 44 runs in 90 balls with the second new ball. In response a shamelessly partisan crowd swayed and sung with a joy that seemed but an extension of the Last Night of the Proms.
An improved forecast is further good news for Vaughan and Marcus Trescothick, who were reprieved by bad light when England led by 40 yesterday after a weekend in which only 88 overs and three balls were bowled. More would have been possible if both sides had wanted it, even though the England fielders were losing sight of the ball in the gloom yesterday morning and Australia were obliged to bowl only their spinners early in each of the two brief sessions of their second innings.
That might have been a curse in disguise because it obliged Ricky Ponting to bring Shane Warne on to bowl only the fourth over of the innings. It took him four balls to find Andrew Strauss’s inside edge, providing Simon Katich with a catch popped up off the pad to short leg from a leg break that turned out of what is no more than light surface rough. Vaughan’s reaction was to bat admirably positively before, for what may be the only time in his career, he enjoyed the extraordinary experience of being cheered for a decision that deprived 23,000 people of the entertainment they had paid an average of £50 to watch.
Ponting must have considered declaring behind in the hope of a final display of magic from Warne but the weather gave him no option, but to send out one man after another to face Flintoff’s remorselessly accurate fast bowling. It was obvious that sooner or later his own fast bowlers would be deprived of possible revenge by the light.
Had England needed to win rather than draw, of course, it would have been a very different afternoon for those who stayed for two and a half hours of inactivity after 3.42, when the reading on Rudi Koertzen’s digital light meter dropped below five for the second time. That, explained his colleague Billy Bowden, is the guide beyond which they deem the contest between bat and ball to be “unreasonable”.
Matthew Hayden, the quality of whose career-saving, six and a half hour century was underlined by the speed with which the wickets tumbled after he had gone, also had no option but to continue batting when first the light was offered yesterday. He had lost the company only of Ponting and Justin Langer during the 45 overs and two balls on Saturday in which Australia advanced from 112 for no wicket to 277 for two. One ferocious over from Stephen Harmison had eventually seen the back of the tenacious Langer but Vaughan used his pale cutting edge yesterday only to try to force another bad light offer. It was Flintoff, the supreme athlete, and Hoggard, the new ball specialist, to whom he turned for wickets.
It helped him that Damien Martyn lobbed a pull to square-leg only 13 balls into the morning’s play. The moment the new ball was taken at 282 for three after 82 overs there was no doubt who held the initiative. Flintoff bowled unchanged from the Pavilion End, taking three for 24 in eleven full overs before lunch, bouncing good length balls towards the batsmen’s ribs and moving them off the seam. For a time Hayden continued to leave the ball shrewdly in an innings in which he had swallowed his pride in order to rediscover the art of building an innings but the immovable object was now confronted by an irresistible force.
In successive overs Flintoff, remaining over the wicket to the left-handers, removed Hayden and Katich with balls that darted back at pace off the seam. Hoggard, meanwhile, had Michael Clarke dropped before lunch at second slip, Flintoff sighting the ball a fraction late in the gloom. After lunch Hoggard saw Clarke missed again, by Jones behind the wicket and might have had him a third time when Ian Bell failed to pick up a slice drive to deep backward point.
Having wrung an leg-before verdict at last out of Bowden with a ball that pitched on and straightened towards Adam Gilchrist’s leg stump, Hoggard got his just desserts, first pinning Clarke in front, then removing the last two with the help of catches at second slip and deep mid-wicket. Flintoff had to be content with the miscued pull to mid-on that gave him only his second five-wicket analysis in Test cricket but it will be a hard decision between the great all-rounder and Warne as the first recipient of the Compton-Miller medal as man of the series today.
Flintoff has 24 wickets apart from his runs. Warne now has 35 and by removing Strauss for the sixth time he equalled Dennis Lillee’s 167 wickets against England, a record he will surely break today.
