Ricky Ponting facing ignominy of two Ashes defeats in England
Australia captain looking likely to suffer unwelcome experience of his forbear Billy Murdoch in 1890
- The Observer, Sunday 23 August 2009
Australia's captain Ricky Ponting leaves the field after being hit in the face by the ball. Losing a second Ashes series would hurt more. Photograph: Philip Brown /Reuters
Ricky Ponting was spitting blood after the ball smashed him in the mouth at silly point. Real blood, not the rugby joke shop kind. The whole of Australia will expectorate with him if England complete their spectacular recovery from the indignities of Headingley.
Out goes Ravi Bopara, a temporarily broken man, and in comes an Ashes virgin with a South African birth certificate and an iron constitution. Jonathan Trott scores 41 and 119. Andrew Flintoff's Test farewell turns out to be a minor sideshow and not the distraction it threatened to be. Stuart Broad files a claim to be the new Fred. And right there at the top of the heap, a modest, cultivated leader, who responded to a meltdown siren back in January to assume the captaincy, establishes himself as the man of the series. These are Andrew Strauss's Ashes, unless Australia chase down 546 to win, in which case Ponting would be the new Houdini.
Try telling our old standby, the American tourist, how a team can be eviscerated in Leeds and then torment their oppressors only a fortnight later in London. Account for that turnaround. Watch their eyes frost over as you explain the intricacies of pitch preparation and how it all depends on which way a tossed coin comes down.
The outback is vast, so there will be many dusty places for Ponting to hide should Australia's captain become the first since Billy Murdoch in 1890 to lose two Ashes series here in England. First, though, when this Oval Test has been safely housed in one of those weird-but-true family attractions, baggy greens must be loaded onto a train to Edinburgh, where Australia are due to play a one-day game against Scotland, possibly the only country that hates losing to the English more.
Sympathy would abound in Auld Reekie. But not back home. The Australian public will not want to hear ad infinitum that the Oval pitch was so dry and dirty that only tumbleweeds were needed to turn it into a full Spaghetti Western set. If this pitch is a parched batsman's cemetery, how come England managed to score 705 runs on it? Allowing, of course, for the fact that they won the toss and struck 332 on a less sadistic track.
There have been times this week when Gardeners' Question Time threatened to take over from Test Match Special in the BBC commentary box, so intense has been the horticultural dialogue. Beyond the minutiae of pace, bounce and puffs of dust, there has been a profound and unexpected swing in matters of temperament and character. The two areas, in fact, that generated so much scorn when England bowled wantonly at Headingley and dished up their middle order like a suckling pig.
Anyone who stood on an orange box and delivered a definitive judgment on any day of these five Tests would now feel a chump. Intuition says it is the fragility of both sides that has caused control to lurch this way and that. Somehow the whipped dog that was English cricket rose from its Yorkshire basket to give these Australians a savaging over three days in Kennington.
The 2005 finale was superior to this one in drama and individual talent. On this same field were assembled Shane Warne, Glenn McGrath, Adam Gilchrist, Kevin Pietersen and Flintoff in his prime. Four years on, we found Australia labouring to bowl England out on a turning pitch with Marcus North, a part-time spinner. North's commendable toiling was both a relief and a rebuke to Ponting, who will forever be remembered as the captain who discarded his only specialist twirler (Nathan Hauritz) on a surface that might have been grown in Oklahoma in the 1930s.
Before hostilities were resumed, in Cardiff, you would have drawn plenty of laughs with the prediction that Hauritz, through his absence, would be a prime factor in this Oval end-game. Hauritz as history's catalyst: discuss. Let's put it another way: who could have known that Ponting's captaincy might be broken by his failure to select The Man Who Isn't Shane?
Reading too much into press conferences is a risky activity. But on the eve of this match there was just a whiff of complacency about Ponting. Or premature triumphalism. The expected message was that Australia must be on their guard against an English counter-surge, that the deal was not yet closed. All that boring party-line stuff to catch the ears of the players. It never came. By selecting the same starting XI that had trounced Strauss's mob at Headingley, Ponting ignored the altered circumstances and was too loyal to Stuart Clark, who might have been asked to sit this one out so Hauritz could turn his hand in spinner heaven.
If any county were going to sacrifice gate money for patriotic motives then it was always going to be Surrey, that land of Jaguar cars and stockbrokers. Yes, the pitch has guaranteed a result, but no, the Surrey groundstaff could not assume that England would win the toss, or that Australia would pick the wrong team, so any Antipodean accusations of doctoring can be dismissed on grounds of logic.
A more understandable gripe is that England have returned to the old days of fast-tracking South Africans into the camp. In this case, to solve the crisis caused by Bopara's decline from new star at No3 to baffled twitcher. Trott's 160 runs across two innings served the extra purpose of veiling Paul Collingwood's rotten form. He would be unwise to look for external causes for the mess he finds himself in, but Ponting is within his rights to cry out that Trott, who represented South Africa at youth level, acquired many of his virtues in a different hemisphere.
But unless Australia, who were 80-0 at the close, can reinvent Test batting Ponting will drag the weight of this series through the rest of his life, even more than 2005, because there was "something personal" for him in the quest for atonement, as Tim Nielsen, the coach, concedes. His men swung south in full command of this contest, needing only a draw to retain the urn. After Headingley, only Mike Hussey wore a question mark. Test cricket plays so many tricks.
So while Ponting counts the ghosts that would stalk him from the field if he becomes the new Billy Murdoch, Strauss advances to the heart of England's sporting life. Charisma is not the same as self-promotion; quiet application sometimes counts for more than celebrity leadership. This series could be characterised as recession cricket, for straitened times, and Strauss is the quiet man who has led England back to the sunlight.
No comments:
Post a Comment