Ashes 2011 (7 page)

At 100 for three, there was abruptly the hint of danger. Hussey nicked his first ball just short of Swann at second slip, and Clarke ducked unblinkingly into a Broad bouncer. From Clarke, in fact, emanated signals of some distress, which cannot help but be interpreted in light of his chronic back problems. He never achieved fluency in a fifty-ball stay, and set off without looking at the umpire when he nicked a half-hearted pull as though glad the interlude was over.

When Swann resumed after lunch, Hussey came down the track to shovel him back down the ground for six and rocked back to pull three early boundaries. It evinced less a concerted plan from the batsman than erratic length from the bowler, perhaps from an excess of sprinkler dancing. Actually slightly flattered by three overs for 34, Swann looked momentarily vulnerable. He perked up finally when able to bowl to the left-handed North, whom he dismissed for the fourth time in six matches. Suddenly his bowling acquired a little more loop and shape, a mix of speeds, and greater economy: after his early prodigality, he gave away just two runs an over.

In the on-going battle between man and machine that is the referral system, meanwhile, Aleem Dar was outdoing Garry Kasparov against Deep Blue. For the fifth time in the game, Tony Hill upheld his judgement when England appealed for a catch at the wicket against Clarke (then on 1). Snicko later detected a tiny, indeterminate click, although this said little – studying the Australian vice-captain's struggles, you half imagined the noise to have come from his creaking back.

Australia's backbone was Hussey. He was unbending, the slow pitch feeding the pull shot he favours, the bowlers' inconsistency of line allowing him the singles he likes. He found a trustworthy partner in Haddin, who belied his reputation for peeling off exotic 40s with a strait-laced 22 in 105 minutes. England were on the brink of a new ball at 4.20 p.m. when the heavens suddenly opened, finally reminding us that we were in Brisbane rather than the milder south. The forecast for the next three days suggests few further problems overhead; England have a few at ground level to dispose of first.

Number four is the hinge point in any batting order. Think Tendulkar, Lara, Pietersen. In days bygone, think Greg Chappell and Graeme Pollock, David Gower and Colin Cowdrey. If your number four is making runs, your team is probably ticking over nicely. If not, his failures can reverberate down the order.

In England last year, Australia's number four Michael Hussey could barely buy a run until the Oval Test. It seemed to set his team-mates' teeth on edge. The tale of Australian batting in Brisbane today was accordingly bittersweet. Hussey made a sterling undefeated 81. The trouble is that he is now batting at number five; a version of his earlier malaise has enveloped his successor at number four, Michael Clarke.

First the good news – for Australia anyway. Early on, Channel Nine's protractor, which measures the alleged deviation of balls after pitching, and is studied as seriously as ballistics testimony before the Warren Commission, had little to do. By the time Hussey took guard, however, the game was in the balance at 100 for three. He propped forward to his first ball from Steve Finn, which arced from a tentative edge towards Swann at second slip. On a quicker deck, the snick would have carried comfortably; here it fell tantalisingly short. Some batsmen in this match will blame the slow pitch for their dismissals; Hussey is one who should bless it.

For the last eighteen months, of course, far less has been coming out of Hussey's batting than has been going in. A cricketer with a Stakhanovite ethic, he reminds one of the comment attributed to his former state team-mate Graeme Wood after he was advised to relax: 'I'm working really hard on this relaxation business.' But the dwindling dividends of that physical and mental investment have sorely puzzled him. In the middle, Hussey has been lurching back and forward between strokeless defiance and headlong attack. In Mohali, he grafted almost three hours but scored from only every fifth ball he faced; in Bangalore, he played a sparkling cameo then chased a wide one. Returning home, he indulged his taste for pop philosophy by saying that he didn't 'feel the talk' about his place, and expressing the view that he was 'playing well inside myself'. Outside himself, he commenced the domestic season with three runs in three innings.

Then last week at the MCG, Hussey peeled off a domestic hundred, and a positive hundred at that, with 72 in boundaries. It's debatable whether such performances can be deemed to represent a restoration of that precious state of grace called 'form'; Mitchell Johnson, who took a fast, furious five-for in the same game, has here bowled like a drain. But at the very least it hinted that batting proficiency is only ever an innings away.

Here, as in Melbourne, Hussey set quickly about punishing even minor errors of length, the trampolining bounce tending to make short balls sit up for a batsman's delectation. He pulled Swann thrice early, Finn twice more, each shot comfortably controlled and kept to ground. After tea, Swann bowled to him with a deep mid-on and a deep mid-wicket, which he still bisected: in all, nine of Hussey's thirteen boundaries were cross-batted to leg. He seized on opportunities to drive too, and responded to a glare from Stuart Broad, which seems roughly equivalent to getting an earful from Aled Jones, by stroking him soundlessly through the covers – perhaps the shot of the day.

Now for the bad news. Clarke also made a hundred in the first innings of his most recent Sheffield Shield game, but when he batted low in the order in the second innings to save the aching discs in his lower back was gingerly walking singles as he drove the ball into the deep. Clarke told anyone who would listen that he was fine coming into this Test, giving himself a clean bill of health even on Shane Warne's new talk show, but his performance today suggested that you can't believe everything you see on television.

When Clarke's back first played up five years ago at Old Trafford, he batted like a man in a full body cast. Today he seemed resigned to limited mobility, and to be trying to play accordingly, but the conditions did not suit his forward press or his limited footwork. His travails against short-pitched bowling were painful for onlookers, and for him as well, especially when he nodded into a Broad bouncer as though he simply couldn't avoid it.

Clarke has made himself Australian cricket's marathon man – the only player being consistently selected in all forms of the game. He is trying to prove a point, but is now in danger of proving another. A year ago, Clarke seemed a banker to replace Hussey in the number four slot, yet his average since assuming the position as of right is just 20. Thirty in April, he should be in his batting prime. Australia needs more from number four: it will have to find it from somewhere.

The first hour of the third day of the First Test contained 21 runs and the last hour 19 runs, although they were in their ways as integral to a fascinating contest as the 240 runs between times. Australia's survival of the first hour without losing a wicket was crucial to their dominance; England's similar survival at the end offers some hope for the morrow.

The balance of the day was almost entirely Australia's. Michael Hussey, 'Mr Cricket', fell five runs short of a double-hundred in five minutes short of 500 minutes, an innings encompassing 330 deliveries, a six, 26 fours, four threes, ten twos, and 53 singles – and which was as impressive as those vital statistics sound. It was model batting from a model professional. His head was bent as low over the ball at the end as at the start, like a schoolboy swotting over his homework.

With the bustling Brad Haddin, Hussey constructed a record-breaking 307-run stand on sturdy foundations, taking a careful 299 balls over their first hundred runs, 158 balls over their second, and 84 over their third. England now need to bat perhaps 150 overs, about twice as long as in their first innings, to salvage a draw; it is not beyond them by any means, but nor theoretically is a political comeback by Margaret Thatcher.

What will gall them is that it could easily have been otherwise. The first hour of the third day was the Test's tensest so far. Channel Nine are introducing new batsmen and bowlers this season with quaint identification portraits: Englishmen and Australians pose uneasily in strangely washed-out colours, which lend them the exsanguinated pallor of the stars of
Twilight.
Just for once, James Anderson bowled as menacingly as promised on screen, hungry for blood. He bent the ball both ways, used the full width of the crease, and beat the bat almost as often in eight overs as bowlers had in the rest of the game. There will be few better spells this summer, and few better unrewarded ones ever.

Again, the referral system was on trial – and, frankly, flunked. After fifteen hesitant and nervous minutes, Hussey (82) was hit on the pads by Anderson and given out immediately by Aleem Dar. When Hussey challenged, replays suggested that the ball would have hit the stumps but had landed a micron outside leg. If you recall, the referral system was meant to counteract umpiring 'howlers'; this was the kind of fifty-fifty lbw decision that batsmen would once have accepted as their occasional lot, hoping for better luck another day. Yet it was overturned.

Worse was to follow in Anderson's next over, when he bent a ball back into Hussey and hit him on the knee roll on the line of leg stump. This time Dar shook his head slightly; so did Strauss, rather more wearily, having deployed his two referrals unsuccessfully the previous day; Anderson's head was sunk in his hands. It was hard to avoid the sense that Dar, like many an umpire before him, was erring on the side of caution, fearful of another mistake. In doing so, alas, he had perpetrated another, for replays showed the ball to be bisecting middle and leg. And so the endless quest for 'perfect' umpiring led to compound injustice, undermining an excellent official and cheating a deserving bowler. Strauss had previously come out agin the referral system. 'Cricket is about the umpires making decisions,' he observed last year, 'and players living and dying by those decisions.' Nothing occurred here to change his mind.

England did a reasonable job of keeping their cool under the circumstances, although some chagrined and martyred looks were exchanged, and a few words escaped the normally taciturn Anderson and the never knowingly outtalked Broad. The match at this stage was still finely poised. But as the sun emerged, the ball lost its shine, the fielders' legs grew heavy, and Australia began to pull away.

Hussey greeted Swann with dancing feet, launched him down the ground for four to go to 96, then drilled a hole in the covers with a well-timed jab at Broad to attain his twelfth Test century, second in consecutive first-class innings and second in consecutive Ashes innings – heavens, fans were wondering by now, what had all that fuss over his position been about? There was more to it, of course, and none knew better than Hussey, who celebrated with unusual abandon, including a fist-pump from the Lleyton Hewitt playbook. In doing so, he probably infringed all manner of trademarks – a cease and desist order from Hewitt's intellectual property lawyers is probably in the post.

What was perhaps just as interesting was that Haddin was very nearly as animated, giving his own punch of the fist as he ran through, and joining Hussey in a husky embrace. Cricketers enjoy a redemption story even more than fans; it's how they dream that their own bad luck/bad form will end. They see themselves routing their doubters amid standing ovations, making it all up to their suffering families – whom Hussey did indeed salute, with a wave to his wife (Mrs Cricket, presumably) and children.

Perhaps Haddin had his own situation in mind. No questions had been raised about his selection prior to the game, but this was his first Test match since March, and some critics had taken a shine to his proxy Tim Paine in England and India, as they had earlier talked up rivals like Darren Berry, Wade Seccombe and Graham Manou. Haddin resumed in the subdued mood in which he'd left off the night before, England restricting him by bowling wicket-to-wicket, although they needed to, because he unfailingly penalised deviations from the plan by the inexperienced Finn. It was by slashing a wide one from Finn backward of point then punching the overpitched follow-up forward of point that Haddin reached fifty in 134 balls and 190 minutes. He will seldom have batted longer for the milestone.

With that, Haddin upped the tempo. He scores in unusual areas: he drives straight, he cuts late, he hits on the up through cover, he wellies through mid-on with a strong bottom hand. He has an appealing laconicism: he doesn't fidget or filibuster; between deliveries, he usually holds his ground; between overs, he holds smiling mid-pitch chats. During one longueur today, he engaged Broad in a chat in the middle which seemed pleasingly expletive-free.

Haddin got into trouble only when he attempted to manhandle Collingwood, whose relief overs the Australians were intent on minimising in order to maximise the load on England's four specialist bowlers. On 63, he hit high rather than long down the ground, and the ball descended through the fingertips of Cook running back. But once bitten never shy, he carried on playing with freedom, using his feet and the air to collar Swann, and finally flat-batting down the ground for six to achieve his hundred, the second fifty of which had taken 88 balls.

Thereafter the partnership began accumulating decorations: biggest here, longest there, among most exasperating to England anywhere. When it reached 276, it became the highest of all time in Gabba Tests, in addition to being 200 more than England's longest collaboration in this game. Convinced by now of
Survivor
-like immunity, Haddin (114) top-edged a cavalier pull shot from Broad, which Anderson made a meal of at mid-wicket. England was not to see Haddin's back until Australia's lead was 189, when Collingwood caught sharply at slip, whereupon there was a belated and irrelevant clatter of wickets.