'Give them a bat and they reach nirvana'

It speaks volumes of Australia's batting in this Ashes series that, after four innings, Ashton Agar, an unknown entity before his heroics at Trent Bridge, is their leading run-scorer with 130. Mike Selvey, writing for The Guardian, cheekily hints that Australia may have to bring in an unlikely source from their camp to get the runs for the team.

At Worcester, before the Ashes series started, Darren Lehmann donned his whites (or those of someone else) and a Baggy Green and carried the drinks out for his team, a spirit-lifter but getting a small buzz, you can believe, from being back in the mix. Then at Hove last week he went one better and put on the pads, Boof having a biff in the nets. It looked like someone in genuine love with the game, and by all accounts he looked OK, having a bit of fun because he could. Except that with it came the realisation that with the exception of Michael Clarke he was, with 82 first‑class hundreds as a credential and five of them in Tests, and the technique and nous that goes with them, probably still the most accomplished batsman in the party, not too dissimilar to England nets when Ottis Gibson was the England bowling coach shortly after taking 100 wickets in a season for Durham.

Ian Bell, on the other hand, has had a good Ashes so far, scoring two hundreds and a fifty in his four innings. In an interview with Donald McRae, in the same paper, Bell explains why his century at Trent Bridge was superior to his 109 at Lord's.

"Scoring a hundred at Lord's is always special but the conditions at Trent Bridge made it the better knock. It was quite testing. As a middle-order batter, the hardest thing is to start against spin or reverse swing and when I came in it was reversing a long way. I'd improved after playing in subcontinental conditions and, after the series in India in the winter, I tried to put that into my game. The Aussies all reversed it and did it very well. They swung it both ways and it was very difficult. Lord's was a much more traditional English swingy day - a bit more what we're used to - but a reversing ball at Trent Bridge made it all the more challenging. And to have scored a hundred in one of the best ever Tests means a lot."