Taylor finds form

COMING AS he does from Wagga Wagga, in up country New South Wales, Mark Taylor, for all his travails of the last 18 months, will always have remembered that a bush fire starts with a single spark. England might well have cause to look back to the Race course Ground yesterday, as the place where the flames began to flicker once more, and to another Australian Dean Jones, the Derbyshire captain, as the man who struck the tinder.

Taylor, without a run worthy of its name this summer, had scored just a single in Australia's second innings, when he edged Phil DeFreitas low to first slip.

It was a defining moment of the day, and perhaps for the summer, because Jones, hands like buckets and not a man to do his compatriots any favours, grounded the chance, and then stood back and watched as Taylor, slowly and uncertainly at first but more confidently and expansively as the afternoon gave way to evening, passed his first half century of the summer - only his third in a year and a half and by the close had batted 44 overs, making 59 of Australia's 148 for two.

Although this is only a start for Taylor, it must have been uplifting just to walk from the field in the company of his fellow batsman, Taylor, it seems, has had the world bearing down on him for some time but to all appearances has faced the nightmare with fortitude. Yesterday though he took the field with a new spin having been put on the situation by the former Australian captain Greg Chappell, now a commentator, who believes that the only reason Taylor has not fallen on his sword is that he is too potty to realise his predicament.

Writing in the Sydney Sunday Telegraph, Chappell said that in his view, Taylor was "in a classic state of denial" which prevented him from acknowledging his predicament. "He is in no fit state to be captain of the Australian cricket team," wrote Chappell.

Such doggerel of course will always come back to haunt. It is the nature of things and Taylor, an intrinsically decent and determined man, will have been spurred to extra effort. Perhaps that was Chappell's motive. The overs after Jones' miss were not pretty, with just one more single in the next seven overs before he carved a wide full toss vigorously to the square cover boundary. Later though, as the bowling wilted in the biffing wind, and his confidence grew, the old punched lefthanders' drives came out of the locker and he hit fours in a stay that so far has lasted 168 minutes.