Never in the game

It is hard to comprehend that England began the fourth Test on Friday morning with a clear-cut opportunity to seal the Ashes there and then. Leaving aside the chaos that inflicted them before the start of play, England won the toss having stacked their team with bowlers, and so had a glorious opportunity to take advantage of their bravado by batting first in apparently perfect conditions. With enough first-innings runs on the board, they could pile the pressure onto their clearly fallible opponents. Or so the plan went, at any rate.

Two days and a session later, the momentum of England's campaign has hit the buffers, after a defeat as devastating as any they have suffered in the past 20 years. Though Andrew Strauss scoffed at the very notion of "momentum", and claimed he did not believe that such a concept actually existed in international sport, his opposite number Ricky Ponting had no doubt. Australia, he claimed, held every advantage going into the Oval Test, after a performance that, in his 14-year, 135-Test opinion, could scarcely have been bettered.

"You can't ask for anything more," he said. "I don't we could have done anything better in this game. Almost every chance that was created was taken, while everything we've done, whether it's been guys starting their spells or batsmen coming to the crease and starting their innings, have been really sharp and spot on. We've grabbed the momentum early in the game and run through it right the way through, and here we are, two-and-a-half days into the Test match, having just played some of the best cricket these group of players have played.

"It's just amazing how quickly things can change in this game," said Ponting. "It was only at Lord's a couple of weeks ago that no-one thought we had any chance at all of being able to bounce back this series, and here we are now sitting back doubting everything that England's been doing. Things have changed pretty quickly. We've been in total control this week which is something I'm proud of, but we've got to make sure we carry that over into next week."

Strauss, for his part, was eager to avoid being drawn into a discussion about where the balance of power in the series now resides, largely because he recognised it was a chat he was unlikely to enjoy. "If there is such a thing as momentum, it probably has [shifted], but I'm yet to be convinced it means a lot, that word," he said. "As a team we've always come back well after performing badly, and I take some comfort from that. But I also realise that without making sure we don't make the mistakes we've made here, and without making sure we prepare properly, we're not going to be able to take anything for granted."

Whatever Strauss may think of the nebulous forces at play in this series, it is hard to discredit the evidence of the four matches to date. Australia seized the early advantage at Cardiff, when they reacted to England's throwaway first innings by grinding and thumping their way to 674 for 6 declared, their highest score in Ashes cricket for 75 years. Yet England wriggled out with a draw, and carried the conviction they showed on that final day all the way to Lord's, where Australia simply failed to make an appearance until the match was all but over.

Duly invigorated by their efforts in that contest, England took command in between the showers at Edgbaston, only for Australia this time to wrestle the initiative, and more, in a final-day performance that began as a rearguard but finished as a statement of intent. Michael Clarke bossed the last-day batting with his second century of the series, and as Andrew Flintoff faded from the reckoning with every passing delivery, so Ponting turned his (and England's) attention to the contest looming at Leeds before the end of the same week.

"For me, the momentum thing is about what your individual players get out of the game," said Ponting. "There's not many of our individuals that have not taken a lot from [this match]. We're all confident with what we've done, but we've got to keep a lid on it. It's one Test match that we've played well in in the series, but the real work starts for us when the Oval Test match starts now. We've got to have the same attitude we've had around the group this week. If we have that then we'll be very hard to beat."

If Australia marched up the M1 last week with a sense of a battle rejoined after a torrid fortnight of retreat, England's arrival in Yorkshire was chaotic in the extreme. Their determination to give Flintoff as much time as possible to prove his fitness backfired badly, because it meant at least five of England's over-inflated 14-man squad remained unsure of whether they were playing, certainly at 5am on the match-day itself, when the entire squad sent 20 minutes shivering in the rain after a fire alarm at the team hotel, and in some cases even as late as half-an-hour before the toss, when Matt Prior's back spasm caused a further wave of disquiet.

"If we use that as an excuse we're barking up the wrong tree," said Strauss. "That first morning was far from ideal, not knowing the side at 10.30am and a bit of mad rushing around. But as batsmen you've got to deal with changing circumstances all the time, so to use that an excuse is not really valid. You like things to be sorted out earlier than that, but the reality of the situation was that the first session was an awful session, and from there on it was very hard to get back into the game."

To call England's performance a "choke", as it would doubtless have been described had South Africa been the side on the verge of conquering the Aussies, does a disservice to that concept as well. As a rule, South Africa's moments of meltdown have come from positions in which they seemed to be in control. England never for a moment exuded such confident vibes, even as early as the first ball of the match, from which Strauss somehow failed to be pinned lbw. To all intents and purposes, this contest was all over by lunch on the first day. This was not a throttling, it was a heart attack. And England have a fortnight to locate their defibrillator.