CRICKET: If the magnitude of captaining England on the most high-profile tour undertaken by the team had failed quite to sink in to Andrew Flintoff, then it did so at The Gabba yesterday.

The giant concrete bowl, a world away from the gentle ground it once was, echoed emptily to the sounds of preparation. Early tomorrow (1am, Irish time) as the first ball of the series is bowled, it will be bursting with 40,000 people packed in.

Flintoff took time off from practice to stand on the outfield and just imagine. "I looked around and pictured it full," he said, "and it is going to be a magnificent spectacle. It is what we play the game for. We know there is a lot of support over here for us and it will be special."

All matches against Australia are special, but the first of a series here is particularly so. This is an Australian citadel, the place where the home side try to set the agenda for the series. Three tours ago all the build-up and optimism counted for nothing when Michael Slater gleefully carved a Phil DeFreitas long hop to the boundary and in that instant, it seemed, Australia had the series won.

Four years ago it happened even earlier when Nasser Hussain asked the Australians to bat and the cricket world looked on askance. Australia finished the day on 364 for two, England had lost a key bowler, Simon Jones, to a terrible injury and that, effectively, was that.

This is different, though. No longer do Australia hold the whip hand. The mystique is gone, the bubble pricked in England in the summer of 2005. Say what they like, and they do here, but it is the home side, creaking towards a collective swansong as they approach their cricketing dotage, who have it to prove.

Can Matthew Hayden walk the walk any longer as well as talk the talk, and how much has Justin Langer really suffered from the fearful blow to the head inflicted by Makhaya Ntini? What of Damien Martyn, who had all but retired before he was recalled? Adam Gilchrist has not been the same batsman since Andrew Flintoff terrorised him from round the wicket and is thinking of retirement.

And Glenn McGrath, genius but living on borrowed time; how will he cope at nearly 37 with the rigours of five Tests in six weeks after a year from the game?

For Flintoff's side, inexperienced in this country, it is a great adventure, a voyage of discovery. Ricky Ponting's team, on the other hand, are searching for redemption and they may not be given long to find it.

Both teams have found it necessary to rearrange their plans in the weeks building up to the match. England, of course, lost Marcus Trescothick, which meant adjusting not just the batting order but the slip cordon and probably the spin-bowling option, too. To this can be added a concern over Ian Bell, centurion from the match against South Australia and a pivotal batsman at first wicket down. Should he not make it, then Ed Joyce, newly arrived as Trescothick's replacement, would be chucked in at the deep end.

The Australian strategy, meanwhile, has been thrown out of kilter by yesterday's confirmation that Shane Watson, the all-rounder expected to share the seam-bowling burden, will not play because of his injured hamstring and will be replaced by the batsman Michael Clarke.

If there is a familiarity to the balance of their side, with only four frontline bowlers now, then it will put extra strain on McGrath in particular and also on Shane Warne, whose record at The Gabba is excellent.

Eighteen months ago it was Warne who almost single-handedly kept his side in the contest, with 40 wickets in the series at fewer than 20 apiece. Warne also scored more runs than either Gilchrist or Martyn. Even if we tend to remember the heroics of Flintoff or Kevin Pietersen, it was Warne without question who was man of that series.

But here lies one further question regarding the Australians. Warne has been mesmeric, but his time with Hampshire has allowed English batsmen the chance to play him and learn. In the last series he succeeded by bowling just two types of delivery.

There was a leg-break that he spun to varying degrees, from not at all (Bell's dismissal at Lord's was to such a delivery) to huge (Andrew Strauss at Edgbaston). And there was a deliberate, slow, perfectly straight ball of a kind that could, taken out of its Machiavellian context, be delivered by a 10-year-old. It was enough.