Salesmen of Ashes Are Coming Home T-shirts had an extremely poor time of it yesterday. Bowled out before lunch for 172 by a fellow sporting a goatee beard and earrings, England managed to get back in the game by taking four prime Australian wickets for 50 in an hour or so after the interval.
It was as good as it got. On a fresh, sunny afternoon where the pitch lost its friskiness, the ball failed to swing and the England batsmen wished they had applied themselves to better effect in order to have some of it themselves. Matthew Elliott and Ricky Ponting, the next generation of Aussie batsmen, put the bowling to the sword with a scintillating unbroken partnership of 208 - scored at an unacceptable rate of more than four runs per over, to leave them, at 258 for four, in a position of strength that in all probability has placed the salvage of this match - and with it the dream of regaining the old urnbeyond England's reach.
England bowled indifferently, exemplified as the shadows lengthened by Mark Butcher's first international over that lasted 10 balls and his second that lasted a further eight.
Yet still they had their opportunities, with Elliott in particular surviving chances when 29 - a simple one to Thorpe at first slip that would have given Mike Smith his first Test wicket (Thorpe is catching only half of the chances that come his way) - again on 63 when Atherton failed to cling on to a low catch in the gully, and finally by Smith at long leg in the penultimate over.
Players of the highest calibre need no second bidding, let alone the generosity of a third or fourth and just as they had with Elliott at Lord's they paid heavily for it once more. By the close, Elliott, the tall left-handed Victorian who has long been regarded as having the potential to be the next great Australian batsman, had made 134 , his second Test century.
The Australian innings had been a transformation from a processional morning that saw the nightwatchman Dean Headley last for 40 minutes, and then the last seven wickets, including Mike Atherton for 41, the highest score of the innings, tumble in little more than an hour for 34 runs, Jason Gillespie bounding with the breeze at his back down the hill from the Kirkstall Lane End to take six of them in 47 balls at a personal cost of 23.
Things had actually started in promising fashion for England, with Atherton, over 2 1/2 hours at the crease already, digging in once more, and Headley, driving McGrath to the cover boundary for his first Test runs, looking as comfortable and confident as anyone.
The batting, as it had been on the previous evening looked positive and the bowling playable and Headley had made 22 out of the 35 the fourth wicket partnership yielded, when Mark Taylor brought Gillespie on in place of Reiffel, and the mayhem started.
