General adoration on the feast of St Shane

CRICKET/Ashes series, fourth Test:On a chill, blustery, showery day - the sort that unless you had been to Melbourne before might be expected in April at Derby - they came, some 89,000 of them anyway, to worship at the shrine of St Shane. And midway through the afternoon he extracted the wicket of Andrew Strauss, his 700th in Tests to such acclaim that the noise tested the foundations of the MCG's new stands.

There was more to come, though, for by the time the England innings stumbled to a close well after tea Warne had taken five for 39.

He had done it as easily as if he had been playing beach cricket in St Kilda with his kids, the force of his personality pre-eminent, and Andrew Flintoff's side are under the hammer again.

With each succeeding wicket he was engulfed by team-mates, severely road-testing the security of his hair - so often and so hard was it ruffled - until Monty Panesar's dismissal brought yet another five-wicket haul. Warne stood alone once more and soaked up the adulation from the vast stands.

It was all so predictable, pre-ordained, probably foreseen by Nostradamus, and as the spinner made his way from the arena and up the players' tunnel he radiated the sheer pleasure at the lark of it all. This, as he reminds us often enough, is not just a supreme sportsman but a great entertainer who knows his moment.

If the day was Australia's, there was still a sting in the tail, however. After Justin Langer and Matthew Hayden had sent the reply rollicking along, surviving a number of lbw shouts from Matthew Hoggard that deserved better consideration than they received from Rudi Koertzen, Flintoff began the process of bulldozing into the innings by taking the wickets of Langer and the nightwatchman, Brett Lee, with successive deliveries to leave Australia at 48 for two at stumps.

England's captain has not yet given up the fight.

This was not quite the ruthless performance from Australia that the scores suggest. With the Ashes already reclaimed, there was just a hint of a let-up in their relentless pursuit of the whitewash that alone will purge the sin of losing them 15 months ago.

It would have been mayhem but for some uncharacteristic yuletide benevolence in the field that saw two catches missed of a kind that get taken by teams who are on top and with a mission, a stumping fumbled by Adam Gilchrist in such a ham-fisted way that at first one suspected a plot to keep Kevin Pietersen at the crease, and a number of run-out chances spurned.

Yet in conditions that were always going to be difficult for batting, if not quite enough for either captain to want to take the risk of putting the other side in - the decision was taken out of Ricky Ponting's hands - the persistence of Australia's seamers in bottling up one end, and Warne's tenacity and drive once he had sunk his teeth into the rump of the innings, made England look second-rate.

At one time 101 for two, England contrived to lose wickets consistently through the afternoon, the last eight going down at regular intervals for a further 58 runs. Par in the conditions and against that attack might have been about 60 more.

The day had been played out on a niggling, nagging, back-seat-driver sort of pitch, the sort that demanded persistence from the seamers rather than brute force. In this there is no question that Australia, with Glenn McGrath and Stuart Clark, were much the better equipped to take advantage. Between them they conceded very little, boundaries were a scarcity, the ball nibbling off the seam.

The groundsman, it appears, has been caught out by the weather, anticipating drying conditions for his preparation and getting none.

It was well beyond lunch when the crowd got their wish and the blond one took centre stage to bowl from the Southern Stand End, that which might yet bear his name for future generations to wonder at.

By then Lee and Clark had dismissed Alastair Cook and Ian Bell respectively, and Strauss and Paul Collingwood, uneasy but battling, were embarking on restoring balance to the innings.

While Warne warmed up his fingers and loosened his back for three overs, the pair played him with ease, Collingwood stepping from his crease to hit him high over midwicket.

The second ball of the fourth over changed the course of the innings, and made its history. By then Lee had dredged sufficient bounce to have Collingwood smartly caught at second slip, and Strauss, missed by Hayden in the gully off Clark when 41 - having played with great application for almost 3½ hours - had reached his first half-century of the series.

Now Warne tossed one a little higher outside off-stump and Strauss tried to whip it through midwicket. It spun from the edge of the patch of rough already created and took the top of middle stump. Chased by team-mates, Warne set off on a triumphal stampede around the square.

It was the spark he needed.

No one, not even Pietersen, was able to get after him as the ball gripped on the underprepared surface. Chris Read, replacing Geraint Jones, was teased into drilling a wide ball to short extra cover in the manner of Bell at the Waca, and the tail was Warne's bonus. Pietersen, in danger of being stranded once more, and a restrained figure after Gilchrist's generosity, was taken on the long-off boundary for good measure.

It was clinical. It was inevitable. Warne is going out with a bang.