Of dropped catches and batting in pairs

Costly reprieves
Over the entire series, England missed eight more chances than Australia - 25 to 17 - but as with any champion side, England made the Aussies pay for those reprieves; when Kevin Pietersen or one of his mates missed a chance, though, their bowlers just created another opportunity quickly enough so that the bungle didn't cost England much. The reprieves by the Aussies on the last day were symptomatic of what happened through the series: England's batsmen were missed 17 times (excluding their dismissals off no-balls), and they scored 983 extra runs; Australia's batsmen, on the other hand, only prospered to the tune of 502 runs from their 25 chances. (How the calculation was done: the final score of the batsman was subtracted from his score when he was dropped, and the totals were added up and averaged out.)

Geraint Jones and Pietersen were without doubt England's main culprits: Jones missed seven chances while Pietersen dropped six, but on an average the batsmen added only 21 to their score after Jones reprieved them, and 17 after Pietersen gave them a life. On the other hand, Pietersen himself offered an excellent demonstration of how to make use of a life: dropped on 0 and then on 15, he went on to bludgeon 158 on the final day at The Oval in an innings which was largely responsible for denying Australia the Ashes.

The swing merchants
One huge difference between the bowlers from the two teams was the amount of seam and swing that England bowlers - especially Simon Jones and Flintoff - managed, and how Australia's batsmen struggled to combat it. England's fast bowlers simply created more chances, especially after Lord's - they bowled 23.57% potentially wicket-taking (PWT) deliveries, while the corresponding figure for the Australian seamers was only 19.98%. (That might seem a small difference, but over the total number of deliveries bowled in those four matches, it translates into 147 more potentially wicket-taking balls by Flintoff and co.) The Australian batsmen were hit on the pads a whopping 167 times by England's fast bowlers, of which 19 of them turned out to be successful lbw appeals. For Australia's seamers, those numbers were only 75 (hit on the pads) and four (lbws). Australia's only saviour was Shane Warne, whose PWT factor was 26%.

Batting in pairs
Another area where England trumped the Australians was in building partnerships: there were 18 fifty-plus stands, of which eight were converted into three-figures. Australia had 14 which went beyond 50, but only three of those turned out to be century stands.

Perhaps the biggest divergence for England between this series and the previous ones was the contribution of the openers. In 32 earlier Tests against Australia (64 innings), England only managed 16 half-century and two century stands, while the average opening partnership was 33.34. This time, with Glenn McGrath absent for two matches, Jason Gillespie completely out of sorts, and Brett Lee plagued by bad luck and inconsistency, Marcus Trescothick and Andrew Strauss made merry. They averaged nearly 54 per wicket, and half of their ten innings produced at least a fifty-run stand, with a couple of them going on to three figures.

Interestingly, despite Matthew Hayden's poor run, Australia's most productive partnership was also for the first wicket. Hayden and Langer put together, on an average, 49; the second-highest stand was 45.44, for the fourth wicket. However, of the 490 runs Hayden and Langer contributed, almost 40% came in the last Test; in the first four Tests, they had only managed 33 per partnership.

The body blow
Harmison didn't end the series with a huge tally of wickets, but he did have the pleasure of hitting the Australian batsmen on the body the most number of times. He did that on 20 occasions, that's three more than the number of wickets he managed. Flintoff was next in line with 14 hits, as many as Lee, Australia's top hit-man.

The batsman who suffered the most was Langer, who braved ten blows to the body, two more than Pietersen. In all, England won the hit-on-the body contest quite handily too - their bowlers inflicted 43 blows, and their batsmen suffered only 26: another result which would have been unimaginable a couple of years ago.