CRICKET/Ashes Series - Fourth Test:Five forty-five, with the shadows already lengthening across the MCG, and Brett Lee uprooted the leg stump of Matthew Hoggard to bring the fourth Test to a close with more than two days in hand. Thus ended another disaster for England, done, for the fourth time in a row, to a frazzle.
A hammering by an innings and 99, on a pitch that demanded a close-fought, low-scoring, industrial sort of match is as abject as it gets and follows on from the 277-run shafting in Brisbane, the six-wicket walloping against the head in Adelaide and a 206-run hammering in Perth. Sydney could be the pits for a side totally shot to pieces.
In the great scheme of things, yesterday ought to have been another Shane Warne horror story, The Shaning perhaps, on his farewell from his spiritual home. But although he wore some special gold-embossed boots rather than those embellished with a red tongue like a Rolling Stones poster, he did not manage a golden second-innings performance to enrapture another massive crowd of 80,000. The seamers did not allow it.
Warne did grunt, ooh and aah his theatrical way through 19 overs, but they were almost academic, requiring another statistical stimulus to uncreak his back, this time to try to follow Sri Lanka's Muttiah Muralitharan as the only bowler so far to reach 1,000 international wickets. He managed a couple, but Sajid Mahmood and Steve Harmison do not register too highly on the Warnometer of great dismissals, and he now has 999. Just something then to make sure that next week's programme is not just the Glenn McGrath show.
The Australian seamers, most particularly Stuart Clark - who, Warne not excepted, has been the outstanding bowler in every game - but also the vibrant Lee, were exemplary, giving a totally ruthless display of how to bowl on a pitch offering just sufficient help to a clued-up bowler who had the discipline and intelligence to exploit it.
Each of England's bowlers, when not joining a padding-up procession, should have been made to watch the manner in which these two, and McGrath of course, went about their task. Then they should have it recorded by their video analyst and put it on their PlayStations.
With the exception of Steve Harmison, who bowled in this match as he ought to have been doing by the time they got to Brisbane for the first Test, and Andrew Flintoff with the first new ball, they were generally dismal, seduced maybe by the manner in which the captain had blasted a hole in the Australian innings.
But having plans is one thing, implementing them quite another. This surface, better on the second day but never one on which a batsman ought to feel truly comfortable, asked for stifling tactics, simple disciplines of line and length, the sort that dear old Alec Bedser, seen leaving the ground with the end of the match in sight and sadness etched into his face, will talk about for hours. Maybe one day someone will listen and realise that in many respects the game is what it was.
Some simple statistics from the match tell their own story.
Effectively, England were beaten by two batsmen, who made 309 runs between them in their only innings - England managed 320 in the match - and four bowlers. To compile their runs England batted 140 overs while Australia required 32 overs fewer to make 99 runs more, this after being 84 for five. England managed just 17 boundaries in the match, while in their only innings, Australia, Matthew Hayden and Andrew Symonds for the most part, hit 34 fours and three sixes, all on a pitch that should have yielded runs grudgingly.
But a batsman who knows that a hittable ball is coming sooner rather than later is given that much more confidence in defence: the innings will never stagnate. So once Flintoff set his fields back and allowed easy singles so that Symonds could play himself in and with Hayden get the match-winning partnership going, there was no pulling back. Rarely were they placed under pressure to score.
By contrast, England, 260 behind on first innings in any case, felt compelled to go looking for the ball or become becalmed. Five batsmen - Alastair Cook first of all, followed by Kevin Pietersen (pushed up the order to four and looking pretty miffed about it, too), Paul Collingwood, and the Andrews, Strauss and Flintoff - were dismissed on the drive, where the shot should have been regarded as hazardous unless to a long half-volley. The captain, incidentally, along with Ian Bell before him, gained extra distinction by being given out lbw.
If there is a contrast to this, a demonstration of just how far England are from gathering together a complete attack to match the performance of that two summers ago, it is in the sheer naive bowling of Mahmood. No doubt he will regale friends and family with the tale of how he whipped out four Aussies in the St Stephen's Day Test. Yet if his bowling on the second evening was excellent, that yesterday was totally abject.
Perhaps he is confused by the plural in the banal phrase "getting the ball in the right areas". On this pitch there was only one area at which to aim, and it was on a length hitting the top of the off-stump. Five runs per over on as skinflint a surface as this, and lucky to keep it down to that, was way short of international standards. If he is going to be the star that is expected he had better grow up fast.
Guardian Service
