Lucky venues, and captain-centurions

England's nailbiting win in the second Ashes Test at Edgbaston kept the series alive, and it also further strengthened their record at that venue to 21 wins and seven losses. Over the years, certain grounds have almost been talismanic for some teams - they can't seem to lose there no matter what - while others have exactly the opposite effect, almost seeming to deflate teams the moment they step onto the ground.

And it isn't necessarily only a home venue which works for teams, either. You wouldn't want to take on the Australians at any ground in the world, but certainly not at Cape Town, which has been their home away from home: in nine Tests there, the Australians have notched up an incredible eight wins. The only time they lost at Newlands was in 1969, when South Africa trumped them by 170 runs in the first Test of the series and then went on clean them up 4-0.

In fact, for three other teams, the venue which has fetched them the highest percentage of Test wins is an overseas one (minimum qualification: five Tests at that ground). England, who have won five out of nine at Port Elizabeth, South Africa (four out of five at Wellington) and West Indies (five out of six at Perth) have all found that playing away from home - at least at certain grounds - isn't such a problem at all. The fortresses for the rest of the teams, though, all lie in the comforts of their country, as the table below indicates. At least for three of these teams, this stat isn't a surprise - India, Sri Lanka and New Zealand have all been much better teams at home than abroad.

If the best grounds for teams show a fairly diverse mix, then the worst ones are, not surprisingly, in Australia. England, South Africa, West Indies, Pakistan and New Zealand all have their worst record in an Australian ground. Two of those teams - England and Pakistan - have especially struggled to deal with Perth's trampoline-like bounce. (Perth is also, for obvious reasons, West Indies' best venue.) And the best chance of beating Australia is to play them at Karachi, where they have suffered five losses in eight Tests. The next-worst ground for them is, interestingly, The Oval, the venue for the fifth Ashes Test this season. With the series already going so well for England, here's more reason for English fans to rate their chances of regaining the Ashes.

(Click on the teams in the table to check out their venue-wise results.)

Captains leading by example
In the batting horrors after making all of 32 runs in his first four innings of Ashes 2005, Michael Vaughan responded in magnificent fashion with an outstanding knock of 166 to become the first centurion of the series. In 63 series between England and Australia (excluding one-off Tests), this was only the 15th time that the captain from either team made the first three-figure score, and the sixth time it was done by an England captain. The last captain to achieve this was Steve Waugh, when he scored 105 in the series opener at Edgbaston in 2001. That's recent enough, but the last England captain to achieve this feat was Colin Cowdrey, way back in 1968.

A captain scoring the first century of the series has been a good omen for Australia - they have won five out of nine series - but it hasn't quite worked that way for England, who have only won one out of five and lost three. The last time this happened in a winning cause for England was in 1956, when Peter May made 101 at Headingley, and England went on to take the series 2-1, which, by the way, is exactly the scoreline that David Graveney, the chairman of selectors, has predicted this time around.