England blew it yesterday. Presented with the sort of conditions that have seam bowlers salivating and batsmen praying for redemption, they produced a performance of staggering ineptitude and succumbed to Steve Waugh's 26th Test century, an innings of supreme mastery and technique which, barring long-term interference from the weather, has almost certainly guaranteed his side victory.
Australia will resume today on 332 for four, a lead of 38, and by the time the light closed in and the showers began shortly after tea, Waugh had made 101 runs with not a hint of a blemish, except a possible run-out chance when 63.
Earlier he had added 133 for the fourth wicket with his twin brother Mark, who made a determined but, relatively, less accomplished 49.
When that wicket fell there was still a chance for England to make further inroads before Australia drew level. But Waugh and Damien Martyn, who is now being given the opportunity to play for his long-term future, have added 65 for the fifth wicket without being further troubled. The explosive Adam Gilchrist has yet to come and the omens for England are not good.
There can be no grumbles from the England camp, no grouses that they have not had the rub of the green. On the first day Waugh gave them the best batting conditions of the match and they were rescued from ignominy only by a madcap last-wicket partner ship. Yesterday morning, when Darren Gough and Andy Caddick pulled back their hotel curtains, they would have seen a mist that was not to lift until late in the day. The ball, they might have surmised, would loop the loop.
Levels of expectation create their own pressures, though. Gough got the day off to a rousing start by pitching his first ball up and ripping it through Slater's defence to rearrange the stumps, but thereafter, except for one good six-over spell from the pavilion end in the afternoon, he was never up to scratch.
Caddick was happy from neither end, fiddling with his run-up, fretting at the footholes and sending the ball consistently short and wide when it is axiomatic that the best chance of taking wickets is to get the batsmen to play the ball.
Lack of preparation may have been a factor - it is more than a month since he bowled with a red ball in a match - and Duncan Fletcher will have the difficult task of assessing whether more bowling for him between Tests will be beneficial even if there is a risk of injury.
However, it did little to dissuade the Australians from the notion that, when the stakes are highest, Caddick cannot produce the goods. Gough's overs, 20.2 of them, cost him 91 and Caddick conceded 93 from 20.
Chances were few. For England to compete in this series, everything will have to be taken; instead three went begging yesterday.
Four overs before lunch, when he had 29, Mark Waugh danced down the pitch to Ashley Giles and missed, and the ball hit Alec Stewart on the upper arm. That would have been 229 for four.
Immediately after the interval the same batsman, without having added to his score and under some pressure, fenced tamely at a shortish ball from Craig White, the most slippery and on the day most dangerous of the pace men, and edged it low to the left of Marcus Trescothick at second slip.
To groans from another capacity crowd, he dropped it. Charitably, he may have been unsighted in the murk, the ball lost against a background of the crowd rather than sightscreen.
Seven runs later, the Australian captain pushed White into the covers and set off for a sharp single only to see Ian Ward come skidding in, field the ball one-handed and, like a scrum-half feeding the ball out, throw at the stumps on the dive. Waugh was out by several feet had it hit; it missed by a whisker.
Already though Waugh had been making them pay. The early exchanges had been watchful; the bowling fired wide and playing into the Australian hands.
Then Waugh began to unveil his array of drives, cuts and flicks off his legs.
One boundary through midwicket took him to his half-century and by lunch he had reached 62, the session punctuated in the most emphatic of fashions when he cuffed Giles to the point boundary and trotted off to the dressing room. He rarely misses making a psychological point.
An hour after lunch, in the first over of a new spell from Caddick, England took their second wicket of the day when Mark Waugh flicked outside off stump at Caddick and edged to Stewart. It was the seventh time that the pair had added a century together.
Martyn has been batting well and has a point to prove having come in to the side at the expense of Justin Langer, a fixture and fitting for 33 matches in a row. Where Mark Waugh had laboured at times, he brought a scampering intensity to the proceedings.
An edged boundary brought the runs that put Australia into the lead, and twenty minutes later, 226 minutes after he had arrived at the crease, Waugh clipped White behind square leg for his 13th boundary to bring up his century.
If he is not already regarded as such, he is a genuinely great batsman, as good as any in the modern era at carving out runs when the team needs them most.
In the course of his innings, when 35, he became the second Australian, after Allan Border, and only the third person in all - Sunil Gavaskar is the other one - to reach 9,000 Test runs. Only Border (27), Bradman (29) and Gavaskar (34) have more centuries. The man is a phenomenon.
Yorkshire's Michael Vaughan is unlikely to be fit until the fourth Test at the earliest following a 20-minute operation yesterday to repair a damaged cartilage in his left knee.
