CRICKET:AT LEAST nobody can claim this time that the Ashes series was settled the moment the first ball was bowled. Even the most one-eyed Australian will agree that it lasted at least three balls this time, at which point Andrew Strauss imagined that he might strike an authoritative first blow and slashed a short ball from Ben Hilfenhaus straight to Mike Hussey at gully.

It is not remotely all over, of course, however disappointed England will have been not to make topside of 320.

Believers in The Theory of the Ashes First Ball will have carefully noted Hilfenhaus bowled it and Strauss left it alone. If that was not incontrovertible proof of stalemate, and an indication the series will be closely contested right up to the final day in Sydney early in the new year, then this Ashes first-ball theory is not all it is cracked up to be.

As for the Ashes third-ball theory, that was just something to amuse Australians until the pubs closed.

England supporters saw it differently. All day an advert for something or other with Hussey at its centre played interminably on Channel 9.

“Some people call me Mr Cricket, some people call me Huss, but you can call me Mike,” it said.

Well, thanks for the offer. But at the precise moment Hussey held the catch, England supporters were calling Mike something else. The first word was “lucky”, the second was a matter of choice.

Strauss’s shot, irrespective of the fact it was a bit too close to cut, might have flown anywhere, but Australia had their man – the England captain, the batsman they have talked endlessly about targeting, the batsman moreover with an undistinguished record in Australia, out for nought.

According to the theory, England would then crumble. Instead, it took Peter Siddle’s inspired hat-trick just before drinks in the final session for Australia to claim the best of the first day.

“It hasn’t all gone to plan but we’ll come back scrapping,” said Ian Bell, whose contentment at number six will be severely compromised if hat-tricks from Australian fast bowlers suddenly catching a fair wind at the least likely moment keep leaving him short of lower-order partners.

If first-ball theories are largely bunkum, first days can invite deeper insights, one of the most persuasive ones being that although fine batsmen have often appeared at six, the former Australia captain Steve Waugh among them, and although Bell has a good record there, he has been in such polished form on this tour it would not take many below-par batting performances for him to be moved higher up the order.

Another inescapable conclusion, until Siddle put a different complexion on things, is that this Australian attack is unlikely to last the series. Siddle’s punchy, cartoon-character aggression, allied to more nous than he is often given credit for as he bowled the correct length for this surprisingly slow Gabba surface, guarantees him a place until this side of Christmas assuming his fitness holds.

The same cannot be said of Mitchell Johnson. The Daily Mail has already pronounced his tattoos “too vulgar for words” this week while helpfully providing a photograph of him topless so that readers can exercise their disgust to the full.

Whether the tattoos are vulgar is a matter of taste, whether they are working in cricketing terms is obvious: on the evidence of the first day they are not.

Johnson stayed true to his promise to forget about swinging the ball in the Ashes series, to clear his mind and to concentrate on banging the ball in and bowling fast. This was not the most convenient method on a day when the ball swung and the pitch lacked pace.

On tattoos, though, Johnson’s know-how is inescapable. He is correct when he says that the cherry-blossom pattern is associated in Japan with good luck, but he may be unnerved to recall that it is also associated with a short, if brilliant, flowering period followed by a premature fall to the ground. If he awakes from a nightmare to find that the balls sprayed around his pitch map have all turned into cherry blossom then he will know that he is really in trouble.

For the Aussies, Siddle proved Ricky Ponting’s trump card. This is an uncompromising, robust competitor, an honest bowler with no frills or frippery, who hurls himself so hard into the fray the dust kicked up by his boots might be smoke. He has not played Test cricket for the best part of a year, the stress fractures to his back sidelining him for months.

Of all the Australian seamers, however, he is the one who, as a result of being out of the international scene, has had the best preparation. This was a factor that won him his place ahead of Doug Bollinger, deemed not to be match fit. A sucker has been given an even break: Bollinger may struggle to regain his spot for a while now.

What the England bowlers should have observed was a lesson in the lengths to bowl. If Siddle looked enthusiastic but innocuous in his first spell, so that Ponting ignored him for a while, he removed Pietersen and Paul Collingwood to slip catches in his second go, and then four wickets in the space of 12 deliveries in his decisive third crack.

Strauss alone fell to anything other than a ball of full length. Heart and simplicity did the job.