England battle their way back

Cricket Ashes, Second Test: It is a measure of a good team that it responds to adversity by raising the stakes, and at the Adelaide Oval yesterday, first with diligence, then expansion and finally with some measure of exhilaration, England battled their way back into the series.

There was no philharmonic trumpet to tootle the Barmies and the team along, but the horn-blower would have recognised a work in three parts - the adagio and lento of the first two sessions transformed to allegro in a glorious, rousing final movement by the stupendous talent of Kevin Pietersen.

This batsman turns heads and matches with equal alacrity, and just as his innings at Brisbane had offset defeat with its message of intent, so again yesterday he was able to dictate terms in no uncertain manner to Shane Warne, reducing him to mortal levels.

Paul Collingwood, by contrast, is the foot soldier of cliché, a scrapper who gives little away and asks for nothing in return. No spectator comes to the ground in the hope of watching him bat, but none of the 32,000 who wended their way home at stumps could but admire the application over the four-and-a-half hours and more that put him within two runs of the century so injudiciously cast away at The Gabba.

England had reached 266 for three at the close, with Pietersen's buccaneering unbeaten 60 the counterpoint to Collingwood's 98. At 158 for three in the final session, with Ian Bell caught up in an adrenal rush of strokes and dismissed after hours of suffocation by stifling bowling and tourniquet fields, there had been a chance that England might waste the advantage they will have gained from first use of the Adelaide pitch.

For the last hour-and-a-half, as Collingwood nudged and nurdled his runs and fed the strike to him, Pietersen simply took the game by the scruff and shook it alive. His second ball from Brett Lee, a bouncer, fast through the air if sluggish off the pitch, was dispatched witheringly through straight midwicket.

To Warne, he merely stepped from his crease, slipped inside the line of the ball and with a turn of his wrist and a free swing of the bat belted him high for six over wide long-off, in the direction of the cathedral. Later Warne was cut for successive boundaries and reduced to bowling round the wicket into what rough had accrued, so that Pietersen could only hoof him away. What irony there is in a legend systematically dismantled by a fellow he calls his friend.

Nor was he the only icon to be brought down. In the days leading up to the match, there had been anxiety in the Australian camp over the fitness of Glenn McGrath. By the toss yesterday he had convinced his captain that the condition of his left heel, that which stamps into the ground and bears the brunt of a fast bowler's action, was pain free.

As the day wore on and McGrath was reduced almost to slow medium, so tentative was his delivery stride, it became clear this was the response of a man who was willing to bite the bullet in the cause of team and career but may have been unwise in doing so.

Never give a sucker an even break, said WC Fields, and McGrath recognises that there are young thrusters waiting to take his place. Twice in the field he proved embarrassingly fallible: when Collingwood, recognising his man, pushed straight to him at mid-off and ran, and from the penultimate delivery of the day, when Pietersen's wild pull spiralled in the general direction of mid on and he was left floundering. On the evidence of the first day, there is little left to give: this may be the last Test of a titanic career.

Once they had lost the toss, and the ball failed to offer swing or seam, Australia's tactics were clear, and for the first half of the day, in which they gave England's bowlers an object lesson in parsimony, they did a superb job. Runs were gleaned rather than harvested.

The openers, Andrew Strauss and Alastair Cook, were so strangled that they conceded their wickets to Stuart Clark, the pick of the Australian seamers once more. But Bell and Collingwood then embarked on a third-wicket stand of 113, ugly to watch at times but effective, which ended only when Bell, having hit Lee through the covers for two successive boundaries, got caught up in the moment, tried to pull a short ball and top-edged a return catch.

Collingwood continues to astound. The manner in which he played Warne was instructive - hang on the back foot unless the ball was full enough to be smothered, then, with the exception of two pulled boundaries towards the day's end as Warne tired, score almost exclusively with a square cut and a shovel through midwicket. He hit seven fours to Pietersen's five fours and a six, the partnership that had brought 153 in the second innings at Brisbane now worth 108.

The naming of an unchanged side by England, to match that of Australia, will have caused some furore within a romantic lobby which envisaged Monty Panesar, spinning England to victory.

The wisdom of those who really know this pitch, however, is that the danger to batsmen in the fourth innings comes, not from spin, but from tall pace bowlers. The Panesar-Giles debate has been a red herring.

Sometimes realism offends.

Guardian Service