And God spake...

Clearly I’ve been right all along. Of all the sports in the world it’s cricket that God has chosen for his own. As my wife Sue drily remarked afterwards, when there are so many prayers which need answering, why did this one get the vote? Leaving theology aside – and more than one clergyman has played for England, although none as far as I know for Australia - Panesar and Anderson did indeed end up saving the first Test for England, but they had to survive a full eleven overs to achieve it, and not the five I whimsically suggested yesterday. It was as good an afternoon’s cricket as anyone could have dreamed up, one which will be recalled in years to come, and a timely advertisement that Test cricket can provide more excitement than any other form of the game. Just exercise a bit of patience!

Half way through the day, yesterday’s more pessimistic prediction looked as if it might be nearer the mark. Hilfenhaus and Hauritz set problems from the start. When the ball is hard, spin bowlers can benefit as much as the quicks , and Hauritz’s height and ability to push the ball through meant that he could extract the bounce which Swann had earlier failed to find. Hilfenhaus was the best of the quicker bowlers in the England second innings: he was fulfilling the role which McGrath made his own in previous series – relentless in accuracy, aiming at or just outside the batsman’s off stump. His approach to the wicket and his method – even the moustache and beard – is so reminiscent of the great Ian Botham. Videos of Botham in his 1981 pomp must have been a staple diet of young Ben’s youth. Pietersen succumbed early on to him, clean bowled by a good ball. Strauss misjudged a cut shot at Hauritz because of the bounce, and so did Prior. Prior’s was a particularly ill-advised stroke: most schoolchildren would have been able to tell him why. If the ball is turning into you, it’s extremely hard to control a flat-batted cut, unless the ball is very short (bouncing a long way in front of you) and the bounce is low. England were 70 for 5, it wasn’t yet lunch, and no one was giving much for their chances. The weather, contrary to the forecast, seemed set absolutely fair.

Collingwood throughout was playing very well. He’s the one England batsman with the ability not to worry if he doesn’t score for a period of time. His slower natural tempo has caused him recent problems in one day cricket, but here it was crucial. He set himself to eliminate risk, and as coaches never tire of saying, to play one ball at a time and on its merits. Flintoff helped him add over fifty, although he never looked entirely secure. When finally the Australians managed to get Johnson bowling to Flintoff’s end, and when Johnson managed to locate the right line, moving the ball across the batsman from wide out, the end result was inevitable. Flintoff rather tamely steered a catch to Ponting in the slips. 127 for 6. Johnson has had a poor match, and his figures will flatter him at its end. He’s lacked rhythm and accuracy. Expect a different and more menacing bowler at Lords. He’ll like the extra pace in the pitch there.

Broad stayed a while without looking he belonged at a crease he was ironically reluctant to leave when a quicker, straighter ball for Hauritz had him lbw. It seemed a good decision by the umpire. 169 for 7 at tea. Swann had a bad time against Siddle after the break. The Australians are learning that he deals less effectively with the short ball than some, and he took several heavy and painful blows to the body. Nevertheless he hung in bravely, and there was a moment when it seemed he and Collingwood might do the job on their own. The equation was straightforward. If they could score enough runs to get ahead of the Australians, in terms of time each subsequent run would count double because the Australians themselves would need time to make the runs back and win. But at 221 Swann was the fourth lbw victim of the innings, this time to the excellent Hilfenhaus, and Anderson came out to join Collingwood.

Collingwood now had even more to think about, because whereas Swann and his predecessors could look after themselves, Anderson in theory needed protection and to face as few balls as possible from the most threatening of the bowlers. For seven overs or so, they just about managed to cope, although there was serial confusion as to whether Collingwood preferred Anderson to deal with Johnson (bowling very badly given the situation and spraying a lot of balls wide of the stumps) or Hauritz. A run out seemed on the cards. Maybe it was the added pressure which caused Collingwood to go hard at a short ball from Peter Siddle who’d been reintroduced in Johnson’s place. The ball bounced slightly more than Collingwood expected and caught the top half of the bat. Mortified, he watched the ball fly high to Hussey’s left in the gully. The fielder juggled with the ball, but held on.

Panesar and Anderson. Eleven overs to play out. England still a few short of the Australians in terms of runs. It seemed an unlikely proposition. But Hauritz was either tiring or losing his nerve. He seemed unable to apply as much spin to the ball as before, and both batsmen defended well. The occasional ball turned past the bat, but truthfully there weren’t as many dangerous moments as you would have thought. I expected Ponting to bring back Hilfenhaus, but instead he opted for the off-spin of Marcus North, and probably surrendered the chance of victory by so doing. North bowled too wide of the off-stump, even allowing Monty Panesar to chop one ball away to the boundary. Anderson squeezed a couple of balls from Siddle to the ropes as well, and eventually time was played out. Every ball that the two defended was greeted with a huge cheer from the stands. For sheer plastic-cup shredding excitement it was 2005 all over again. If the spectators had been wearing hats, they’d have been thrown in the air, as was the case after the victory which brought England the series win in 1953 at the Oval. How sartorial conventions have changed since then!

The England batting heroes were principally Collingwood and Anderson, although honourable mentions go to Flintoff, Swann and Panesar. Some of the other England team members need to review their part in proceedings. Stuart Broad had a particularly poor game, and will need to come back hard in the next one, or be written off as of dubious temperament. Cook looks out of sorts. Pietersen is still flaky. The Australians say they have the measure of Bopara, although I read that as saying they’re worried about him. The English batting needs to tighten, and their bowling needs to be more positive. The Australian batting looks fiercely competitive again, but their bowling still looks vulnerable, compared to former years.

I imagine Panesar will be omitted from the England team to be announced this afternoon, and the enigmatic quick bowler Steve Harmison will probably replace him. Whether that will turn out to be a good call, I’m unsure. Ironically Swann will perhaps be less effective than Panesar on the quicker pitch at Lords, where the left-armer has had some past success. But who could omit Swann after his courageous performance at Cardiff?

To move from the parochial, there are two other Test matches of significance being played elsewhere in the world. The West Indian team we saw here a couple of months ago has gone on strike. Consequently the West Indian board has sent a young untried team to Bangladesh, and says that unless the recalcitrant players repent it will use the new bunch of lads as the basis of a team for the Champions Trophy in the autumn. The youngsters are just about holding their own against the Bangladeshis, but it will be a steep learning curve for them. And in Colombo, the Sri Lankans are playing the Pakistanis. The civil difficulties in both countries, as so often, put a sunny Sunday afternoon in Cardiff in its proper context. The lengthening shadows of an early evening can be very evocative. We are very lucky.

Playing for a draw?

This first Test is excitingly poised, although there can now only be one winner. It’s something which often puzzles the uninitiated – how there can be a nail-biting draw in sport, but this could be one such match. Soccer now shares this possibility to some extent. In two-leg cup matches, teams not infrequently need only to draw to go through to the next round, and if the match is to be played on foreign soil, it can be a triumph just to hold on despite the partial, heckling support of a totally alien crowd, and a desperate opposition throwing the kitchen sink at you. Down in Cardiff, we can expect the kitchen sink treatment for sure, but the crowd will be almost completely partisan for England. My favourite moment of the fourth day’s play was to hear the punters sing with great gusto ‘God save your gracious Queen’, a pointed and funny reference to Australian republican aspirations. However for England the ‘Barmy Army’ may represent pressure as much as support. England’s performance has been largely unimpressive over the last few days, and the cheers may turn to boos.

But how important for the series it is that England survive the day unbeaten. Their record against Australia at Lords, where the next Test is to be played, is shaming – they haven’t won since 1934, and to go either one down or two down into the last three matches would suggest a bad series loss in the making.

So with eight wickets in hand, England must try their hardest to bat through a day of more than 90 overs – there’ll be time to make up for the play lost to rain yesterday afternoon – on a pitch which as widely forecast is beginning to crumble away. There were moments yesterday when the ball sent up little explosions of dust as it pitched. The height and direction of travel of a ball doing this can be very unpredictable. More worryingly, it’s not only balls which hit the bowlers’ footmarks which are deviating: it’s tending to bounce uncertainly off the main part of the pitch too. The spin bowlers will like it a lot, and the much-maligned Hauritz now has a wonderful opportunity to answer his critics. But Michael Clarke’s occasional left-arm spin may also be a threat. He has a record of embarrassing opponents, notably on slow-spinning pitches in India. His natural spin will take the ball back into the English lefthanders from those footmarks outside their off stump. The English batsmen should just be thankful that Shane Warne is watching from the stands. Were he to be in today’s Australian side, it would undoubtedly be game over.

Not that there won’t be a threat from the Australian quick bowlers as well. A decade or two ago, before the renaissance of late twentieth century spin bowling, it was often said that fast bowlers in this kind of situation could do everything a spin bowler could do, but just do it quicker. There’ve been two crucial things about the fortunes of this match, and one has been that the Australian quick bowlers have outperformed the English. They’ve swung and seamed the ball far more effectively. Was it luck of the draw with the environmental circumstances i.e. were the first day bowling conditions just better than later on? Or was it a variation in the actual cricket balls which made the difference?

Or are they just better?

We’re in danger of talking up the English fast bowling attack. In reality, two of the three on show here aren’t suited to the conditions – Broad and Flintoff. They’re tall men who bang the ball into the pitch, and both have limitations in getting the ball to swing when there’s not much assistance from overhead. The third, Anderson, who I heard one pundit describe as possibly the third best fast bowler in the world today, is a long way from that as far as I can see. He can be very effective, but he has too many days when the force deserts him. In this game both he and Broad have visibly been unable to attack the bowling crease with sustained energy. The same can’t be said of the tireless Flintoff, but even he understandably wilted under the Australian batting pressure. When Collingwood looks the most dangerous bowler, you know England are in deep doo-doo.

Which brings us to the kernel of the matter. Where the English batting was all profligacy, with so many batsmen getting a good start only for them to throw their wicket away, the Australians made the most of their opportunities. Four of them got hundreds: Ponting, Katich, North and Haddin, - the first time this has been done in a match between England and Australia - and all of them scored over 120. Clarke added 83 of his own. They gave few chances, and unlike the English they all played with resolve and orthodoxy. Can the English batsmen now redeem their reputations? They'll have to play out of apparent character to do so. Extravagant shots won't save the day, although negative defence may not be enough either. They'll have to be positive as well as watchful, and play straight. Last afternoon Bopara didn't and immediately paid the penalty

Will the weather come to England’s rescue? It doesn’t look likely: there are showers forecast, and I suppose there may be a delayed start after the overnight rain. I don’t expect England to survive beyond the afternoon session, although the dream start to this series would be a determined England fightback which saw Panesar and Anderson bat out the final five overs of the day. I shall now go to church and pray for that.

England 435 and 20 for 2 wickets: Australia 674 for 6 wickets declared

Ball by ball

A lovely chap called Jay Pink is landscaping our garden, completing a design he began a few years ago, and very beautiful it’s going to be too when he’s finished: he’s a clever man with a good eye - a cricket enthusiast as well. Looking at his shoulders and with regard to his occupation, I should think he could give the ball a fair clout.

It turns out Jay and I do the same thing on days like today when the English bowling is ineffective and wickets are hard to come by. We turn off the ball-by-ball radio commentary in the superstitious hope that in our absence a wicket will fall. Somehow it’s our continued observation which is keeping the opposition batsmen from doing the decent thing. For comparison I refer you to the problem of perception in philosophy which famously led Bishop Berkeley to find a purpose for God. If things don’t exist in the absence of anyone to watch over them – well since God is immanent over the whole of creation, he keeps it in existence by his attention. Phew, what a relief!

Jay is fortunate in that his work permits him to keep an eye on things down Cardiff way rather more effectively than mine does. Recording studios are about the most unfriendly places in that respect. Colleagues are apt to grow impatient if I lend my ears to the casually placed radio and ignore their peerless vocals and immaculate drumming. If you’re an American tourist in London one summer, be aware of the following. All those people with earpieces you see, hanging around on street corners in prominent places – they’re not secret service agents dedicated to keeping the capital safe from acts of terrorism – they’re just listening to the cricket. And if they’re sporting shades, they’re still not secret service agents, they’re just pretending to be.

As a student I remember having a Very Big Argument with the officials at the British Museum, whence I’d gone on a vac job, drawing population samples from lists of voters for the benefit of an opinion research organisation. They objected to me taking in a radio plus earpiece so that the tedium of the work could be enlivened by the day’s commentary from Old Trafford, Manchester. In the end they gave in. Clearly a young man with untidily long hair and frayed jeans couldn’t be all bad, if he wanted to listen to the cricket, and it mattered so much to him.

The idea of six or more hours of continuous broadcast commentary on a daily basis for just under a week may boggle the mind of outsiders, but it’s been a regular feature of British life for more than half a century now, and the fact that the coverage is unbroken by commercials is a miracle of public service radio which because it’s perennially under threat from an uncomprehending coalition of accountants and iconoclasts, needs publicity and protection, if you ask me. Historically ‘Test Match Special’ has also functioned as a model for ‘rolling news’ broadcasting, although I’ve never seen this acknowledged.

Since 1957 I’ve listened to ball-by-ball on countless car journeys, heard it through the mists of fever, and intercepted excerpts for surreptitious sharing between the events of family weddings. During family holidays we’ve tried in vain to pick up reception in outlying parts of France, and mourned its absence when in areas of the world where the BBC World Service is the only British broadcasting on offer. The various commentators have continued to provide a rich vein of whimsical British humour, which has proved a bond between individuals from every age and background.

The staggering thing is how they keep it going – all that talk about, well, nothing really. It’s all supremely trivial and unimportant, and yet it makes for an amiable backdrop to the summer scene, a link to an England long gone.

The play yesterday was very one-sided, both sides of the afternoon break for rain. The English bowlers looked utterly bereft of penetration or ideas, and to be honest it’s often looked that way in the past two years. They promise much, and talk a good game, but deliver only fitfully. And there was a moment late in the afternoon which should ring alarm bells amongst the English batsmen. Collingwood came on to bowl a few overs of slow off-cutters and give the front-line attack some respite. He bowled two consecutive balls at the left-hander North both of which turned out of the rough patches outside the batman’s off-stump. One bounced a lot, and the other barely at all. Both went past the wicketkeeper for four byes (runs scored when the batsman hasn’t hit the ball). The pitch is deteriorating quickly and the English have a lot of left-handers who’ll be vulnerable to Hauritz’s bowling. Watch this space, I'm afraid.

England 435 Australia 479 for 5 wickets

Adagio/Allegro

To show how Test cricket has changed, let me take you back in time (cue: harp glissandi/dry ice). The year is 1961, and as now, it’s the second week of July. England are playing Australia at the Headingly, Leeds ground in the third match of the series. They’re one down, and in the fast bowling department things are sufficiently bad that they’ve called up Les Jackson, a forty year old with a single 1949 Test appearance to his name and thinning hair. As now, public expectation is great: the previous series against Australia in England has been famously won, on the back of unparalleled bowling feats by off-spinner Jim Laker, who’s now fallen out with the cricket authorities and is sulking somewhere in a beer tent learning journalism, writing a rather good book about the series.

On the first day Australia are all out for 237, and England have five overs to bat until close of play. Jackson goes quite well, but ‘Fiery’ Fred Trueman takes the plaudits with five wickets. Trueman is already something of a sporting celebrity, and is to become a greater one in subsequent years. By the close of his career he will have taken 307 Test wickets, more than anyone else at that time, and more than any contemporary or recent English bowler has achieved - in an era when far more Test cricket is played. In that first Australian innings the English bowl 110 overs. The English reply is at an even more sedate pace: it takes them another four sessions of play and 149 overs to reach 299 all out. The pitch is sluggish, and relatively bowler-friendly. The most dangerous Aussie bowler, the left-armer Alan Davidson, reduces his pace and concentrates on bowling ‘cutters’, running his fingers down the left-hand side of the ball to make it ‘cut’ towards the waiting slips. He bowls 47 overs for a personal cost of 63 runs with twenty three of those overs being ‘maidens’ (i.e. no runs are scored from them). At one point Murray and Barrington, neither of them strokeless batsmen, play eleven consecutive overs without a run accruing. This slow rate of scoring is remarkable because fielders then were invariably closer to the batters than they are now, affording to modern eyes, many opportunities to hit ‘over the top’. And also because there is at least one remarkable assault on the bowling which highlights the negligible rate of scoring during the rest of the innings. On the Saturday morning the left-arm spinner Tony Lock strides out to bat, and in three dramatic overs and seventeen minutes hits thirty runs with eight boundaries. Lock was an aggressive cricketer in everything he did. It’s been sometimes said of the great Shane Warne that he was a slow bowler with a fast bowler’s temperament, and the same was true of Lock. He fielded superbly in dangerous positions close to the bat on the leg-side at a time when head protection was entirely absent, and his batting, though usually short-lived, could be brutishly effective. This time it’s probably the turning point of the match. When Australia bat again they collapse in not much more than two hours and are all out for 120 on an increasingly unreliable pitch, destroyed by Trueman’s pace and hostility. The selectors say thank you to Jackson, and he’s never picked again. Mind you, Trueman’s relationship with them, like Laker’s, is scarcely conducted on a bed of roses. All three were regular pro’s in a game at the time ruled by amateurs with dodgy upper class accents and hats. It was the first time I’d ever encountered a real ‘batting collapse’ and I remember the sense of exhilaration as yet another Australian wicket tumbled. England have a small target to chase and win with eight wickets to spare, the match being over in just three of the five days – even more unusual then than now.

In yesterday’s play at Cardiff, 348 runs were scored, from far fewer overs than were seen at Leeds in 1961: just the regulation union rules 90 minus two for a change of innings. Back in 1961, there was no need to stipulate a minimum number of overs. Even though there were already complaints about bowlers wasting time, eighteen overs an hour was pretty standard, more if spin bowlers with short run-ups were operating. By comparison, batsmen took fewer risks and showed less enterprise, as witness the comparative scoring rates. When England were finally all out for 435 this morning, their overall scoring rate was just a shade over four runs an over – double what it was in 1961. The Australians bowled only eleven maiden overs in the entire innings. But this morning too, an English spin bowler launched a succession of bold shots against Australian bowling. Graeme Swann boosted the likely England total with an exciting innings of 47 not out from just forty balls faced. In 1961 the slowness of batting was to provoke a ‘Campaign for Brighter Cricket’, and this in turn led to the invention of ‘limited overs’ versions of the professional game, culminating in the changing patterns of format we see today. Older folks will sometimes say the game hasn’t improved: on that it seems to me the jury must remain out. There were faults then, and there are faults now. Whatever the case, the 1961 Headingley Test was a riveting game of cricket, the Saturday particularly so. How many other new young fans were created that day, besides me?

Once England had been dismissed just before lunch, the Australians showed how to bat on this Cardiff pitch. After the young tyro Hughes had been roughed up by Flintoff, and dismissed by a very good catch from wicketkeeper Prior, although not before he’d scored 36, Ponting and Katich settled in. They played straight, they cut down the risks, and they both scored centuries by the end of the day. England could easily lose from here, so quickly has the game moved on.

England 435. Australia 249 for one wicket.

Ebb and flow

Trevor Bailey is a revered ex-England player, now in his eighties, a bit of a toff, who became a cultured and accomplished commentator on cricket throughout several decades. In his playing days he acquired the soubriquet ‘Barnacle’ because of his sometimes valuable, but sometimes tediously tenacious batting. Thankfully his radio commentaries were rather more flambuoyant: he was rarely boring in the studio. One thing sticks in the mind. Cricket, he said very often, is a situational game. I think what he meant by that was that the fascination often lies in speculation about how a game will develop. The shorter the game, the less scope for such speculation there is, which is why for many, five day Test cricket remains the truest form. How odd that in this developing virtual world, what seems to increasingly draw people is certainty rather than contingency. Discuss.

In a good day’s cricket, the advantage will switch from one team to another, maybe a number of times. Cricket isn’t alone in this: the stupendous Men’s Final at this year’s Wimbledon Tennis Championships showed how it can be true in that sport too, although significantly the five hours’ match duration very nearly equalled a complete day’s playing time in cricket. Roddick and Federer were so evenly matched that when it was finally over, the difference was pretty much the one service game which Roddick lost in the last set: amazingly the only one he lost in the entire match. This year tennis commentators seem to have taken to describing these phenomena of back and forth as ‘momentum shifts’. Cricketers haven’t caught on to that particular piece of jargon yet and talk more folksily about ‘ebb and flow’, which isn’t a perfectly apt description, but sometimes does justice to the palpable sense of loss of control a team may be suffering at any given moment.

Well, today in Cardiff there was plenty of ebb and flow, or if you will, a whole pile of momentum shifting, and at the close it was hard to say who the tide was carrying away. The opening ceremonies tried very hard to set the Australians on their heels with heart-tugging melodies from soprano Katherine Jenkins and co., though I noticed most of the best tunes were Welsh rather than English, but after that setback, the Australians took three prime English wickets before lunch, and would have been the happier team munching on their chicken and pasta. During the afternoon session, Pietersen and Collingwood took the fight back to their opponents, batting looked suddenly much easier, and at 228 for 3 after tea, England were clearly in the ascendant. But then Collingwood offered a weak shot at a not particularly threatening delivery, Pietersen lost the plot and tried something ghastly which might have been appropriate if his personal score had been 169 rather than just 69, and suddenly England looked in poor shape. At which point Flintoff strode to the wicket to join Matthew Prior, and for an hour or so the two of them simply took the Australian attack apart in an exhilarating display of hitting. And if they’d managed to stay together at close of play, England would have declared the day a triumph. As it was, both batsmen lost their stumps to the enthusiastic Peter Siddle, and we’re left wondering where this match is going.

What’s peculiar is that this is a pitch which suggests the probability of boring crcket – it’s low and slow. However today was anything but bum-numbing, and as a first day of Welsh Test cricket, has probably exceeded anyone’s expectations. Where will the momentum shift tomorrow?

England 336 for 7 wickets

Rumsfeld

I can’t conceive what it may be like for the English and Australian teams as they anticipate the first match of the ‘Ashes’ series which begins in a few hours time: for the mere spectator the tension is quite enough, and quite different in degree and quality to any other cricketing encounter I can remember for a while.

To recap, for the first time in many years, and rather against many expectations, when the two teams previously met in the northern hemisphere in 2005, England came out narrow winners in an extraordinarily tight series, characterised by passionate yet friendly rivalry. The English fast bowling was the key to the win, master-minded by an Australian coach Troy Cooley who unlocked hitherto unsuspected guile and consistency. Two winters later the Australians exacted a terrible revenge, annihilating the English 5-0. England’s cricket was poor, and their team morale worse. Their bowling was shoddy and out of sorts. Cooley was now working for the opposition.

He still is, but this time, of the two bowling attacks, at this point it seems as if the English may have the edge. This is for two reasons. One is that Brett Lee, the super-fast glamourboy of the Australian team, is crocked for at least this match and possibly the second one as well. Lee can leak runs, but in tandem with the talented Mitchell Johnson he could have been a mighty, even overwhelming, shock force. Both of them can bat too, and the Australian lower order will be weaker for Lee’s absence.

The second reason is that of the alternatives and supplements to the Australian fast-bowling, only one of the three possibles is experienced in English conditions. That’s Stuart Clark, a big-boned, rather ungainly bowler of no express pace, who nevertheless has patience and nagging accuracy, allied to good variation in cut and swing. The other two, Siddle and Hilfenhaus are known to be good performers but we have yet to see how they’ll go here. My bet is that of the two we may find Hilfenhaus is the danger-man, though the press and pundits don’t agree. Possibly all three may play alongside the formidable Johnson because the one regular spinner in the Australian side, the off-break bowler Nathan Hauritz, hasn’t looked the part so far on the tour, and his previous Test Match record isn’t great anyway. The irony is that the pitch in Cardiff may take spin, and the English may for the first time in many years pick two spin bowlers for the initial match of a series. If it happens, and I say ‘if’, this will be a throwback to the nineteen-fifties when a balanced attack was more-or-less defined as two quick bowlers plus an all-rounder who bowled medium pace and two spinners, one right, one left-armed.

A Test Match has never been played in Cardiff before, although it’s been a long-cherished dream that one day one might. What’s puzzling is that the ECB should choose to hold the first, crucial match of a showcase series there – other grounds have generally been allowed less pressurised circumstances to bed themselves in. There’s much discussion about how the pitch will play: in county matches there this year the ball has turned from the first day – not the norm in English Test Match cricket – but it’s also said that the pitch for this match will have been prepared differently. As Donald Rumsfeld would have said, at the present time this is a known unknown.

The weather is in the same category. Cardiff is slightly more vulnerable to wetness than other parts of the UK, because of its proximity to the Irish Sea and the mountains. Will this counteract any tendency to spin? Will we have sufficient play for a result? The forecast is initially positive, less good towards the weekend.

Two things are known about the respective batting line-ups. One is the resilience of the Australians. Very frequently – and it’s already happened at least twice on this tour – they’ll be five wickets down for not many, only for the last few batsmen, in theory less accomplished, to take them to a very good score. The wicketkeeper Haddin, and Johnson are the two keys to this. They need as close attention and analysis by the English coaches as any of the higher order. The English batting on the other hand can be very good, or it can be horrid, and notoriously they’re vulnerable early in a series. In theory they bat long down the order too with Graeme Swann coming in at number nine, but on a pitch where hard work is required no one after Collingwood at 5 has the aptitude or ability for a long patient innings.

I see no reason to change my earlier forecast for the series – a likely 2-1 or 3-1 to the Australians – although much of the British press believes we can win by a similar margin. But along the way there’ll be unknown unknowns – injuries, outstanding pieces of individual play, maybe even political events – and these will have an effect on the result too. Let battle commence.

Forty years on...

I left Eltham College to go to university after the summer of 1969. Eltham was what was then called a ‘Direct Grant’ institution: free places were available for academically able pupils at this ‘School for the Sons of Missionaries’. At eleven and in the top class of the Maypole County Primary School I could spell and do math, and my IQ rating just about cut the mustard, despite a certain confusion in the non-verbal area - I could never see how all those strange diagrams on the test paper related to each other when twisted through 90 degrees. The Maypole’s distinguished alumni included Mick Jagger and (later) Min Patel, the Kent left-arm spinner who played cricket just the once for England. Eltham could claim Eric Liddell (of ‘Chariots of Fire’ fame), and Mervyn Peake, the artist and author of proto-fantasy novels, but sadly no cricketers or rock n’rollers. Despite that drawback, it was a lovely, leafy place to attend school, and my sixth-form (Grades 12 and 13) was very happy indeed. I chose to study Latin, Greek and Ancient History largely because the Head of Classics, David Herbert, was a very good cricketer as well as a clever man.

There were two cricket squares at Eltham. The lesser of the two stood in front of the school’s pleasant 19th century façade. The playing area was small, and you’d have thought that a satisfying hit through one of the windows on the building was very feasible, although I never saw it done. However there was also a very short boundary on the other side. To prevent cars coming through the hedge onto the ground a tall street lamp had been erected there where Grove Park Road turned, and I do remember its very top being clanged by what appeared to be a remarkable mis-hit during an old boys match (American readers, please note, ‘old boys’ are past students: sometimes very past!). The actual pitch on the 2nd XI ground was slow and rather unsatisfactory: the ball would hold in the lush turf, and it was hard to play confident strokes. When I was younger it suited my brand of loopy low-bouncing, in-swinging medium pace. In my under-15 year I picked up a hatful of fortuitous wickets there.

The senior ground lay on a sunny slope on the other side of the plane trees. The surface here was harder and nicer to play on, and there was a pavilion which some of us used for table-tennis illicitly during lunchtimes in the winter months. There it was that for the first time I made a few runs in a junior house match, and started to believe, after the discouragements of a silly and misguidedly macho Geography teacher, that I could bat a bit. It was only 38 not out from Carey House’s total of about 55 (my house team was a poor one – so poor that they’d made me captain!) and Chalmers - the opposition team - dropped the four catches that I offered them, but never mind, that kind of detail never appears in the scorebook. Martin Shankleman was one of the generous fielders: I believe he went on to a distinguished career as a BBC economics correspondent, although of course there might not only be one Martin Shankleman.

There too in 1969 I carried off the only sporting cup I’ve ever won. In the late nineteen-sixties there was a vogue for ‘single-wicket’ competitions, in which one person was pitted against another in a very short form of the game. You had four overs to bat against your opponent, who of course had to bowl all twenty four balls consecutively – very tiring for a quick bowler! A wicketkeeper and nine fielders were naively trusted with impartiality by fielding for both players. For the most part I played very undistinguished cricket, but managed to do just enough to get through the first three or four rounds. The final must have been unutterably boring to watch, and almost in itself enough to sign the death warrant for this form of the game. I scraped eight almost strokeless runs before giving a tame catch in the third over. My opponent, Phil Raisey, must have been confident of winning – he was pretty confident about most things as I recall. But he unaccountably missed an innocuous straight ball and was clean bowled for three, leaving me to collect the trophy from Judy Rambridge, the school secretary, indeed the only woman in the school, who planted a kiss on my (reddening) cheek. That was even more of a shock than my win: things weren’t usually done like that at Eltham. I hope her subsequent reprimand wasn’t too stern. Moral: single wicket competitions only work where betting’s allowed. At Eltham, although there was a bookie’s just round the corner, visiting it got you chucked out.

The school keeps in touch. It’s changed a great deal. There are now girls as well as boys, which is certainly a change for the better. There’s probably a whole deal more kissing. But the ethos has changed in other ways too, partly by fault of consecutive central governments, and I don’t go back. However this year one young Elthamian has accomplished a feat which will make it to next year’s Wisden where all that is noteworthy about cricket is written down for posterity. In an Under 15 match, Jack Robertson presided over the scoring of 48 runs in just one over. There were four no-balls (invalid deliveries). These add one run each to the score and give the batsman an extra ball. Jack missed one of the (therefore ten) balls bowled in total, but hit five fours and four sixes from the other nine. And this is a world record – wow! - as the school song has it: Floreat Elthamia! Stand and flourish ever!