Cooking with Gas - Day Two at Brisbane

There was plenty of fighting talk from the Australian players on the first evening, saying that two hundred and forty five wasn’t a disastorus total and that they would come back strongly on the second day. By Saturday evening they must have been wondering what had hit them, as Alastair Cook continued to three hundred and seventy one runs since his last dismissal and England moved on to a scarcely credible 834-3 since the halfway point at Brisbane.

Trev emailed me from Australia this morning, echoing Dickens in his assessment that it was the best of cricket and the worst of cricket. Everything that England had touched in the field on the first day turned to gold but Australia contrived to make a mess of the few chances that came along.

Harris and Bollinger didn’t swing the new ball anything like as much as their English counterparts had but they still created chances in the first hour. After Andrew Strauss contiuned his feast or famine form with an ill-judged leave in the first over Australia had opportunities to drag themselves back into the game. First Doherty took aim at the stumps with Trott stranded yards from safety but, unlike Trott on day one, he missed by miles. Then Trott, again, played a fairly typical early innings sliced drive towards gully where Mike Hussey, usually so reliable, shelled the chance. Brad Haddin also dropped Trott, although less damagingly, as Australia’s fielding plumbed depths not seen since the eighties.

Harris bowled pretty well, maintaining control and offering what threat there was, but the much vaunted Doug Bollinger bowled as though he had taken Mitchell Johnson and Devon Malcolm on as his personal bowling coaches, and Xavier Doherty looked horribly out of his depth. To compound the problem, Australia’s plans looked poorly conceived and even more poorly executed. Trott was allowed to get off to a flying start by virtue of the Australian quicks bowling to his strengths and Alastair Cook and Kevin Pietersen, both of whom have struggled in recent times, barely looked troubled. Perhaps the most worrying thing was Australia is that there wasn’t the same incredulity around England’s batting performance as there was at Brisbane: it would have been more of a surprise to see wickets fall.

For all of Australia’ shortcomings, though, England batted beautifully. Alastair Cook seems a mile away from the fretting figure of the summer, Jonathan Trott continued his rich vein of form and Kevin Pietersen was back close to his best. You can, as they say, only beat what it put in front of you, and they made some fairly ordinary bowling look exactly what it is. They will look to build on this tomorrow.

Of course, if Australia get off to a decent start with the new ball then there is still plenty of cricket to be played, as we found at Brisbane. The difference is that England played some good cricket during Australia’s first innings in Queensland and were a little unlucky whereas here Australia were mostly abject. It is hard to escape the feeling that they are only a couple of poor sessions away from becoming a total shambles – tomorrow will be the biggest test of Ricky Ponting’s captaincy and the mental strength of his side. If they can recover from the first two days here then they will deserve massive praise, but if they can’t then it could be a very long series for Australia.