A thriller on an unfit pitch

I would have made Paul Collingwood Man of the Match. His was the innings which decided the Test or, perhaps more correctly, undecided it. When people talk about this game in years to come, as they may, it will be his dogged resistance they recall rather than Ricky Ponting's characteristically crushing 150 – just as it was Ponting's innings which is remembered from Old Trafford 2005 rather than Michael Vaughan's or Andrew Strauss's.

At the end of that Old Trafford Test, Vaughan was able to hearten his deflated and frustrated side by pointing out that the team whooping with delight across the field was Australia, and they were celebrating a draw. It seems unlikely that Ponting would have been offering much comfort to his men if he tried something similar this evening. Rather, he has been reduced to the inevitable taking of positives, as Strauss had to do after the Tests at the ARG and Queen's Park Oval in the spring.

The problem England had then, as Australia did these last five days, was a pitch unfit for Test cricket because it provided a wholly unequal contest between bat and ball. It kept the ground packed for five full days, which was of course the commercial objective, but for cricket the last five days have been yet another travesty. ICC are making noises about making radical changes to Test cricket, but none of them will make any long-term difference to the popularity of the format while “chief executives' pitches” such as these remain as depressingly common as they are. Pitches like these are only really usable by great bowlers, and there were none playing in Cardiff this week.

That James Anderson and Monty Panesar were able to hold out for 12 overs is eloquent testimony to the blandness of the surface. Although there was little about their efforts with the ball for any of the bowlers to be pleased with, with the bat they did at least manage to compensate for the inadequacies of the alleged specialists. The slipshod efforts of Strauss, Alastair Cook, Ravi Bopara and Kevin Pietersen on day one led eventually to a compelling final couple of hours, but this match should have died halfway through day four when Australia passed England's first innings total of 516.

And no, KP, “That's just the way I play” won't wash this time. Nine times out of ten, it's a reasonable defense because the ball he was caught off was certainly there to be hit, but on Wednesday Hauritz threw it too wide for the sweep to be on – a reverse sweep, sure, but not the shot he chose. Let us hope that despite the wish to laugh it off in public, Pietersen has done some serious contemplation while lying awake.

In these days when players eagerly jump into baths of ice at the end of a day's play, a bucket of cold water is probably no longer some kind of shock for them, but less personally masochistic England fans who had believed these two sides were evenly matched have received the equivalent of a serious dowsing. But it means that England have made their best start to an Ashes series this century. They have comprehensively lost on all four previous occasions, with the result looking pretty much certain by the end of day one. So to have hung in at reasonable parity until lunch on day three and then to eke out a draw when all seemed hopeless is a distinct advance. Starving for good news as we are, this crumb of comfort seems like an entire cake right now.