The game Australia are playing is a game of extreme measure and control. In the past week a lot has been said, jokingly, in desperate search for an answer to the strange problem that had arisen, about Australia lulling the English into a false sense of security. While I don’t buy this, and don’t believe for one moment that any of last weeks shananigans were planned, it is incontestable that there was something very lulling about the way Australia went about building its innings last night. It was careful, considered and patient batting. None of the brute domination that we are used to seeing, the beligerent power. Australia are starting from degree zero, slowly working up, making minor adjustments here and there – fitting their rhythms in with the rhythms of English conditions and English wickets. The total lack of panic that they have shown, the calmness they’ve presented must be worrying to the English camp. On last night’s performance they are getting close to tuned. Once the final, fine alterations are made Australia will be playing from a base that is already practically invincible, in full command with a total understanding of the environment and the forces that it is operating with. From here, at various points in time, timed with precision, we will see them launch back into the old intimidating style of abuse we are accustomed to. A carefully plotted route of drilling and launching. It will be phenomenal to watch. Lulling, and then a sudden sharp violence. A Kitano film.

ah the extraordinary events keep coming! The excitement builds and builds each time Australia slump to another embarrassing defeat.

They played a strange game against Bangladesh last night. They batted like the air was too thick to make the ball move through. Maybe it was humid but Cardiff isn’t exactly tropical. At times it looked as though Bangladesh had 22 players on the field, every shot went straight to a fielder. And Bangladesh were tight, they didn’t let things slip. Still, 249 should have been plenty to defend. Australia’s bowling, though, was even stranger than their batting. Due to tiredness and the frustration that comes with trying to watch cricket when one is tired and can’t apply oneself as rigorously to the task as one would like I only managed to watch Australia’s first 12 overs. But it was plodding stuff. Gillespie seems to be almost walking in and trying to bowl a good stock ball every single ball – there’s no variation and no zip, and none of the brutal incisive heroic lines that usually accompany the legendary hair so well. It was almost as though Australia had reverted to trying to play some sort of base game, some sort of ascetic drill in which no ball must be delivered in anger or with any sort of flair. It was like they were drilling. Trying to create a base of correct action upon which they will later begin building something more audacious. Sometime in the Ashes perhaps deliveries will start to rise violently, cut, spit or move along lines that the batsmen find tenuous and diffcult to grasp. For now Australia are going through the motions of mundane production. And it can’t work for them because these players are all too rampantly great to restrict themselves to this form of impassive zero degree form. Even McGrath who is the master of mechanical reproduction of pure basic form, even his mechanics have lost spirit. A Kompressor engine without dreams and vital passionate energies doesn’t make for much of a Mercedes-Benz. It’s going to so exciting to watch Australia’s methods in trying to build their way up from this platform that they have set for themselves. Perhaps, even, they will keep building down and go underground (drilling) and then we will see cricket that we have never seen the like of before. The soil in England is soft – this is the logical place & moment for Australia to select to take their reinvention of cricket to new strata. Cricket has occupied the grass and the air, at times i think it has even occupied the oceans – now it will occupy the deep layers of the earth itself. Only one cricketer has been there before. Michael Slater was there in the previous Ashes tour of England in 2001. He inspired the move. Australia will now continue the work he began, at such a cost to his own being. They will perfect his methods (last night Ponting was batting with a method strangely similar to that used by Slater during that fateful last tour – trying to turn everything to leg). Slats will yet become the stuff of gigantor legend.