Ashes. Bloody hell.

England tasted one of those glorious dramatic draws yesterday that only Test cricket at the highest level of intensity can deliver. I wonder how many of us looked at the line-up and thought: “Oh God, it will all come down to Monty's batting.”

Probably just about everyone in England. What nobody predicted was that the batting of Monty Panesar would see England home to a draw that was all the better for being totally undeserved. Panesar and James Anderson guided England to safety, the No10 and the No11 batsmen in an unbroken partnership of 19.

But forget that 19. The stat that matters is 69, the balls they faced over the course of a pulse-racing 40 minutes of blocking. There was also a fair bit of nudging, edging, hoping and praying. And leaving. England owe this draw to Panesar's leave shot - and that's not a sentence I ever expected to be writing.

All the same, it's true. Monty not only got in line against the quick bowlers with great courage, he also left the slow men and the fast men with marvellous aplomb, and sometimes with more than a hint of a flourish. Sound judgment, cricketing nous with a bat in his hand, not things we traditionally associate with Panesar.

We expect a little bit more of Anderson, a serious chap who works awfully hard on his batting. He is a competent blocker, plays the nightwatchman role and can bat, so long as you don't expect many runs. He has played 50 Test innings without a duck and that is not entirely a statistical freak.

But these men bat where they do in the England team because they are the worst batsmen. When they bat together, the end is nigh, the Last Post is sounding, the fat lady is chewing her throat lozenge and the waiters are putting the chairs on the tables.

It hardly ever happens in any other sport: that everything depends on a person who is not only incompetent, but has no pretension to competence in the discipline he is attempting. Occasionally, very rarely these days, we see a football outfielder play in goal; in track and field, a decathlete or a heptathlete will have a weak event.

But yesterday everything depended on the ability of two cricketers to do something that neither is terribly good at: somehow to bluff and bumble their way through. That they managed it was a triumph. It also makes the interesting point that the Australia bowling attack wasn't good enough. The Monty and Jimmy Hour asked one question: is that all you've got?

Marvellous it was, when Anderson hit the runs that put England ahead, which meant that Australia would have to bat again, a sort of toe-end prod at a bad ball. England had been playing against the odds with every ball of the day, with this perfectly inglorious shot the balance tipped the other way.

But it was still true that every ball might be the one that brought the end, that the last wicket would fall and Australia would have time to score the handful of runs they needed. But Anderson and Panesar defied everything the touring team threw at them; they were still united when the time and the overs ran out.

It was a day that started with idiot profligacy and ended with stern resolution. It began with Kevin Pietersen, Andrew Strauss and Matt Prior giving away their wickets in mad brain-scrambled fashion. There was a strange mood of deathbed frivolity, as if the time for seriousness was long gone. They acted as if they were playing Twenty20.

But then came Collingwood. Right now, I want to fill every single team in every single sport with Collingwoods: 11 Collies for cricket and football, 15 for rugby union, four for polo and maybe one for tennis as well. I want players of no flair whatsoever, with no taste for glamour, who never play a memorable shot, who have no side to them and remarkably little ego, who hate the spotlight and who never get made man of the match even when they win a game of singles.

But they never give up. They try their guts out with everything they do. They have strived all their lives to make a medium-sized talent into a large one and they didn't do it with flowery moves and show-pony posing. They will never achieve greatness, but they are essential to others who will. Perhaps a team of 11 Collies would lack a bit of edge, but I won't hear anything along those lines today. Without the humdrum talent and the glorious bloody-mindedness of Collingwood, England would have lost.

I have never seen anyone quite so mortified at being out, for a moment it looked as if he would literally fall on his sword - or at least his bat - after a stay of nearly six hours and 245 balls. Oh, and 74 runs, for what that matters. But Colly's influence did not end with his dismissal: he is Panesar's official batting buddy, burdened with the task of helping the spinner to improve.

Panesar is close to being the worst batsman England have seriously offered. There is room for improvement, but very little capacity for it. Or so it seemed.

But Panesar's attitude yesterday was all Collingwood: make the bastards get you out, don't throw it away and, above all, if it's not going to hit the stumps, leave the bloody thing alone. (But only then. Panesar should become Pietersen's batting buddy and teach him this important matter.) For yes, this was a day when Panesar outbatted Pietersen and as a result England go into the second npower Test on level terms, better than they managed four years ago.

Two points: Panesar's reward is that he will probably be dropped for the next match after some indifferent bowling and Collingwood has played the best rearguard innings for England since Mike Atherton 14 years ago in Johannesburg. I wonder if Colly can write ...