There was a time just after lunch yesterday when English cricket was transported back to 2005.

Andrew Flintoff was bearing down upon the crease, releasing thunderbolt after thunderbolt, seemingly unchanged over the four-year period even though much water has flowed under the pedalo since then. The crowd was alive to the possibilities, chanting its hero’s name ball after ball, and Australia were under the hammer.

It proved to be illusory, nothing more than a fleeting remembrance of a time that Ricky Ponting, for one, has no intention of embracing again.

It was that painful memory that galvanised Ponting’s team to the whitewash in 2006-07 and, to judge from the flawless way the Australia captain played yesterday, it is a memory that continues to haunt him and drive him forward.

Ponting scored 100 of the crispest runs imaginable and shared an unbroken 189-run partnership with Simon Katich, who scored a century of his own and whose game is much improved from the unreliable model of 2005. A day that began badly for Australia ended in the best possible fashion, Katich celebrating his first Ashes hundred three overs before the close and Ponting scampering through to his eighth and, staggeringly, his 38th in Test cricket, during the final over of the day.

Australia are not yet in a commanding position, trailing as they do by 186, but they bat deep and if the example of Ponting and Katich is followed, they will bat long: a nod in the direction of the home team, perhaps, whose batsmen were so profligate on the first day. England will rue the absence of swing for James Anderson, the ineffectiveness of Graeme Swann and Monty Panesar, and Stuart Broad’s niggling calf injury, which prevented him from bowling for most of the final session.

Ponting arrived at the crease after a flighty innings from Phillip Hughes that can have done little for the captain’s nerves. In truth, England bowled poorly at Hughes, giving him too much width and concentrating, to the exclusion of everything else, on the short ball. Accordingly, this jack-in-a-box batsman got off to a flyer, dispatching Broad to the off-side fence three times and putting any doubts that emerged after his working over against England Lions at Worcester last week to the back of his mind.

But not once did he give the impression of permanence. Indeed, it is hard to think of a more unorthodox opening batsman who has played regularly and successfully at the highest level, and when Flintoff removed his sweater straight after lunch, Hughes’s stay seemed destined to be short-lived. Flintoff located Hughes’s inside edge and Matt Prior accepted the offering, diving to his right.

All the attention at the start of this tour was on Hughes, which probably suited the unassuming Katich just fine. He was happy for the anonymity at the start of his innings yesterday, too, as England’s bowlers lavished their attention on the younger man.

Later, Katich had to defer to Ponting, when the Tasmanian became only the fourth man to pass 11,000 Test runs. Ponting passed that landmark with his 40th run, joining Sachin Tendulkar, Brian Lara and Allan Border, and the way in which he acknowledged it, with just a cursory wave of the bat to the Australia balcony, was the clearest possible indicator that he is not playing this series simply to fatten his statistics.

Quiet and unassuming Katich may be, but for England’s bowlers yesterday, he was deadly efficient. He gave one chance, on ten, when Flintoff could not hold on to a sharp return catch, but barely lofted the ball above the turf thereafter. Limited, in some ways, he restricted himself to drives, tucks off his hip and the occasional late cut, but it was the way he neutered the threat of Panesar and Swann, who bowled 31 wicketless overs between them, that was the foundation of his success.

Swann will find life tougher than he did against the West Indies left-handers, although he argued that Katich ought to have been given out leg-before on 56, and Panesar has clearly not learnt from his failings against Graeme Smith last summer. Like Smith, Katich moved across his stumps and milked the spinner through the leg side but Panesar, as then, countered with little, refusing to chance his arm from around the wicket.