Slow death

The currency of the slower ball has shifted; it's not been particularly devalued by all those power play and death overs, but it's become a common thing. It's a bit like the yorker in that respect, it's reinvented itself as a restraining measure.

But what really makes it work is scarcity. Ravi Bopara went to an old-school slower ball yesterday, one that seduced and then mugged him, one that fooled his senses. It's not good for the self-image that sort of failure, with your bat in the air, your guts lurching queasily. 

Facing a good slower ball is a strange sensation because the realisation, like the ball, takes a split second longer to arrive, and it's a split second filled with confusion. The ball is there, you can see it, it's just not there yet. By the time the brain registers the fact, the body has reacted and run its race.

Being beaten in that way hits you hard, because you've been done, fooled, duped. There's not the consolation of being pinged out by a quick, straight one, of being worked over, of dying a man's death. You're just walking off with a note saying 'sucker' stuck to your back. Oh yeah, it hurts.

Virgin soldiers

At last then, some actual cricket to write about... Show me a man who knows who's ahead after a day like that, and I'll show you a fool or a knave, my friends.

With the weight of expectation, things were always likely to be heightened, and so it proved. England were edgy, manic, prone to doubt or perhaps disbelief while they were ahead. Australia were uncertain too, curiously passive for long passages before they remembered that they were, well, Australian. As England's first day of the Ashes usually goes, this one was a raging success. As Australia's usually go, well, the echo of what they were bounces around them. 

England played more to type, getting themselves in and then getting themselves back out again, and in pairs too. Pietersen played his brainless one thirty runs earlier than usual; Collingwood was dismissed using the shortest backlift visible to the naked human eye; Ravi Bopara was done in by a slower ball so flirtatious that it could have been imprisoned along with that honey trapper today [the deception that the slower ball pulls on the senses is worth a separate entry - suffice to say here that one I was suckered by two decades ago came pouring back through the holes in my brain-stem as Ravinder trudged back up the steps].

Australia went off piste. Their pre-lunch plans were beautifully thought out. Bopara was chinned, Cooked out-fished, Strauss embarrassed. They had Pietersen sussed too, making him play on that braced front knee, his eyes high over the ball. And then after lunch... they apparently decided not to bother persisting with it. Why get KP out, anyway?

The pitch and the tides had their effect. Australia will covet a first innings lead of 70+ to negate batting last, which means at least 400. It's impossible to know how achievable that is until they're actually out there. Fools and Knaves...

It was a taut day, a slow day, a raucous day, a heightened day. No-one won it, which means that no-one lost it either. Oh, and where exactly was Sky Sports' Shane Warne?

Statuesque

The traditional Wednesday in Wales start has flushed the great Simon Barnes into the open for his first - but almost certainly not last - entry into the Phil Space Ashes Urn Trophy contest.

'It's in silence that you find sport at its finest; that moment when thousands, utterly captivated by the same thing, cease to speak, cease to think, cease to breathe... All are silent. All are still. Just one figure in motion: the bowler, the only action figure on a field of white statues. You would think you could hear the beating of his heart from the back row of the stands'.

Barnes is the man who once wrote about a Liverpool goal 'it was not scored by Luis Garcia, as the announcer claimed. It was scored by Havoc, for last night Liverpool cried Havoc and let slip the dogs of sport', so he's clearly only just warming up here. Nonetheless, the image of a non-thinking, non-breathing crowd [comatose at the idea of watching Simon Katich for several hours, maybe?], the use of  'figure' twice in the same sentence and the thought that Harmi's heartbeat might actually be audible at 90 yards smack of prime space-filling. Good effort lad!

The longest day

Yes, in just a few hours' time, we will no longer have to read any more Ashes previews in the papers. The relief is almost physical.

Phil Space: The Ploughman's Spirit

One Ashes 'battle' has already begun: the one in the newspapers. And what a battle it will be, as the chief sportswriters take their annual month off from football and turn their gimlet eye and deathless prose towards the cricket.

First to the plate is the Observer's Paul Hayward, on Andrew Flintoff: 

'To them [Australia] Pietersen is an extravagant run-maker they need to get out pronto. A problem, yes, but not a whole rash of complex challenges, as Flintoff is. They know Pietersen is semi-detached in this England camp. He could never embody English cricket's ploughman spirit, nor hold the side together in adversity, except through weight of runs. Flintoff can do both. He is a country charging into bowl, a culture brandishing a bat. To attack him is to poke the beehive of his nature, which survives the ravages of injuries and calls to the night porter to keep on coming with the trays of drinks'.

A strong start from Hayward, you'll have to agree, but the summer is young. Let the space filling begin.

NB: The Best of the Sportswriters will be recorded here, with the winner receiving the entirely unofficial and arbitrary Old Batsman Phil Space Ashes Urn Award. Lets hope the series gets the prose it deserves...

Achilles' last stand

There was a revealing line in Andy Flower's interview with Mike Atherton in the Times.

'This [missing the trip to Flanders] was not a big enough thing for me to drop Andrew Flintoff. No way was it a serious enough issue to do that, to finish someone's career'.

Those words should chill Flintoff rather than comfort him.

Just like the other Manchester uber-lad Ricky Hatton, Flintoff refuses to concede the damage alcohol is doing. He's 31, persistently injured and the fine motor skills required to bat against the world's best bowlers have been eroded. 

It's not over yet, but as Flower says, it may only be a session or two away.

Brett Lee: They lied

Brett Lee just bowled his way into the Test team at Worcester. He produced an over in which every ball was over 90mph [at least on the Sky radar, a device you wouldn't necessarily want pointing at your car in 30mph zone], and he cleaned up Joe Denly, who was set on 66, and Ian Bell first ball*. He almost removed Vikram Solanki's foot with the next one, which was a reversing yorker timed at 95mph. The Lions were 172-0 at the time.

That over reminded me of the story of Ali fighting Frazier in Manila, when Frazier hit Ali with a left hook that Ali later said 'could have brought cities down'.

'They told me you was finished Joe,' Ali whispered.

'They lied,' Frazier replied. 'They lied'.

*Insert your own joke here.