Australia 263 (Watson 62, Anderson 5-80, Onions 4-58) and 375 for 5 (Watson 53, Hussey 64, Clarke 103*, North 96) drew with England 376 (Strauss 69, Bell 53, Flintoff 74, Broad 55, Hilfenhaus 4-109)
Scorecard and ball-by-ball details
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After a rain-affected draw at Edgbaston, in which England's push for victory fell as flat as the fifth day pitch, the question now stands: who takes the momentum into Headingley? The temptation is to give the nod to England given their 1-0 series advantage and flashes of brilliance between the spells of drizzle in Birmingham. But, on closer inspection, the matter may not be so clear-cut.
Australia will take tremendous confidence from their second-innings batting performance, in which three batsmen passed 50 and one, Michael Clarke, a stoic century in his 50th Test to limit England to just five wickets from 112 overs. Shane Watson's returns of 62 and 53 in his first Test as opener will prove particularly encouraging as will the final-day efforts of Michael Hussey (64) and Marcus North (96), both of whom were in need of a confidence boost.
The Australians will also be buoyed at the possibility that Mitchell Johnson's nightmare might just have been confined to the month of July. Johnson is clearly not back to his wrecking-ball ways from South Africa, but he did manage to make the necessary adjustments to his wrist position to allow him to rediscover the at-the-body line and subtley swing that has made him so effective in past series.
England clearly have grounds for optimism, too. Were it not for the five-and-a-half sessions lost to rain, bad light and the water-logged outfield, they might have better capitalised on their 113-run first-innings advantage. That lead was established after James Anderson and Graham Onions befuddled Australia's batsmen with prodigious aerial movement on Friday, and with Headingley considered among the better swinging grounds in the country, England will hope to probe Australia's barely-healed wounds from Friday.
The hosts will also be satisfied by the manner in which they covered for Kevin Pietersen, but Andrew Flintoff is looming as a major concern. The England allrounder, who is understood to have had two further pain-killing injections to his troublesome right knee prior to this match, fell awkwardly on his left ankle when delivering the final ball of his 13th over. Flintoff required the better part of 30 seconds to climb back to his feet and appeared in significant discomfort, but managed to bowl two more overs in the session. His condition will be monitored with only three days between the third and fourth Tests.
Australia signed off the match with Clarke notching his second century of the campaign and usurping Strauss as the highest run-scorer in the series. For the satistically inclined, it also took his Test average above 50 for the first time since 2005 - and this, in his 50th Test. The pragmatists, however, will note that his unbeaten 103 was not so much important for the runs scored, but rather the 192 balls it soaked up, denying England any chance of forcing a result.
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Unlike the draw in Cardiff, where every ball of the final session was an angst-ridden affair, the Edgbaston Test concluded in anti-climax with part-timers Paul Collingwood and Ravi Bopara in operation and Australia's batsmen scoring at will. Clarke was fortunate to have survived a Stuart Broad delivery that clipped the bail and a subsequent catch off a Bopara no-ball, but eventually raised his 12th career ton with a pull to the boundary and look to the dressing rooms, whereupon he was summoned in by Ricky Ponting.
Clarke had earlier combined with North for a 185-run fifth-wicket stand that effectively ended England's hopes for victory. Despite the heavy overhead conditions, neither Anderson nor Onions could convince the suddenly stubborn Duke to swing, making life easier for the Australian batsmen.
The brisk tempo of previous sessions was absent, as Australia's batsmen sought to grind the life out of the match. First Watson and Hussey, then Clarke and North, batted with patience and caution in their attempt to deny England an inflated series lead ahead of the Headingley Test. Watson and Hussey showed steely intent from the outset and weathered painful blows to the body from Flintoff, remaining unflustered in this most pressurised of situations. Flintoff attempted to engage both batsmen in verbal jousts but both quelled their aggressive instincts and refused to bite. Theirs was a mission of survival and both succeeded in navigating a path through a testing first hour of play.
Flintoff, for all his intimidatory powers, strayed short too often while Swann failed to settle upon a consistent length - but given the respective situations in which Watson and Hussey found themselves at the crease, both could have been well pleased with their morning contributions.
Having previously batted no higher than No. 6 in Test cricket, and with a sub-five average opening for Queensland, Watson was in the crosshairs of both a sceptical Australian public and England's bowlers from the moment he marked centre on Thursday. He did not disappoint. His fluent first innings total of 62 was complemented by a redoubtable 53 in the second; the latter innings terminated when Anderson, in his first over of the morning, found the outside edge with a delivery that subtly straightened.
Hussey, desperate to atone for his first innings duck, played a more aggressive hand, striking six boundaries to advance to his second half-century of the series. But, like Watson, his stay at the crease would end soon after his arrival at the milestone.
Stuart Broad's introduction to the attack in the 51st over might not have done much for his confidence, but the allrounder immediately took the attack to the Australians with an angling delivery that brushed the outside edge of Hussey on 64. The dismissal brought the Edgbaston crowd momentarily back to life, however all were promptly subdued as Clarke and North carried their bats deep into the final session.
North was the only other batsman to fall on the final day, to a brilliant, diving catch by Anderson in the gully off the bowling of Broad. Anderson's spectacular effort denied North a third Test century from five matches, but could not revive England's hopes of victory.
Flintoff's fitness under the spotlight again
August 3, 2009
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It was, on the face of it, a dull final day at Edgbaston - the least enthralling of the series so far, as England's slim victory prospects were thwarted almost as early as the first hour. But in Ashes cricket, nothing takes place without subtext, and as Australia's batsmen rumbled onwards against a toothless, swing-less attack, the state of Andrew Flintoff's fitness became a significant cause for concern.
A fortnight ago on the final day at Lord's, Flintoff produced the finest spell of his career - a ten-over rampage to seize the second Test and push England into the ascendancy in the series. Today, he was a pillion passenger at best, with just 11 laboured overs in the entire day, and none at all in the drifty final session. While he has rarely got the rewards his wholehearted style deserves, it is almost unheard of for him to go an entire Test without a single wicket - the last time it happened was in Perth in December 2006 when England surrendered the Ashes, and before that you have to rewind to July 2003.
Instead of one of the flamboyant celebrations that lit up Lord's, the enduring image of Flintoff's effort came when his left ankle crumpled in his delivery stride, midway through his second spell. Back-to-back contests are notoriously tough for fast bowlers at the best of times, but seeing as Flintoff endured two further injections in his ragged right knee just to take the field for this match, Friday's fourth Test at Headingley cannot come along quickly enough for Ricky Ponting's newly uplifted Australians.
"You could see he went downhill pretty quickly during the course of this game," said Ponting, "so his injury is probably taking more of an effect than we realise as well. But we'll see what happens on the morning of the game. It's been visible over the last couple of days, he's been struggling more than he did during the Lord's Test. When he bowled yesterday he was hobbling a bit and he only bowled 11 overs today. No doubt they protected him late this afternoon, knowing how big a figure he is for the team."
"There wasn't as much in this wicket for him as there has been on previous wickets," countered Andrew Strauss. "It was one of those wickets where the more you hit the deck, the slower it came off, and at the back of my mind I'm conscious that when the conditions aren't really helping him, there's no point in tearing him to death. There's obviously some soreness there, but I don't think anything has deteriorated massively over the course of the game. But he needs to rest up well because back-to-back Tests are hard for any bowler. We'll see how he is for Thursday."
The Flintoff factor is becoming a double-edged sword for England - Australia will continue to fear and respect him so long as he remains in the side, but it's becoming increasingly hard for the selectors to know how best to deal with such a talismanic figure. Though Strauss suggested that his momentum-seizing innings of 74 had been a bonus, the reality is that it muddied the waters even further. Had Flintoff merely been performing as a pace man, then Steve Harmison could step in at Headingley as a like-for-like replacement. Instead, to rest Flintoff on Friday with the Ashes up for grabs would risk unsettling the entire balance of the current team.
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"If he's fit to play then we want to play him, if he's not, we won't, because the Headingley Test is a massive Test," said Strauss. "It's an opportunity to win the Ashes, and we want to play our best team in every game we play. But we've got to be conscious that if he's not fit enough to do his job, he won't play.
"He will be assessed tomorrow, and he knows what he needs to do with his injury," Strauss added. "A lot of it comes down to how he feels with his own body - he's got to be honest about that and he has been so far. He's obviously desperate to play in the last two games, and we're optimistic he'll be fine, but I think he realises that if he's not fit he won't help us."
England did everything they could to force Flintoff onto centre stage for this final day at Edgbaston - even, arguably, to the detriment of their own match prospects. When play resumed with a 28-over-old ball, all eyes turned naturally to the man who wrecked Australia's first innings, James Anderson who, like Ben Hilfenhaus, had found the best swing-bowling conditions around the 30-over mark, when the lacquer had started to come off the still-hard ball. Instead Flintoff galloped in for seven largely ineffectual overs, and when Anderson eventually struck with his sixth ball of the day, an hour into the session, the deficit had been written off and Australia were starting to feel comfortable at the crease.
"We weren't expecting it to swing straight away this morning, so we thought it important to set the tone and Fred's obviously very good at that," said Strauss, who felt that Graham Onions at the other end had served as a barometer for the moving ball. Ponting, however, expressed his surprise at the move. "The ball has started to swing at the exact time that England had [it] this morning," he said. "Flintoff was their best bowler at Lord's, but the wicket and conditions here, being slow, didn't suit his bowling as much, it suited Anderson and Onions more."
All of which adds up to a curious conundrum for England, who have shown a worrying lack of penetration at three crucial moments of all three Tests. When the ball swings, as it has done in the first innings at Lord's and on the second morning at Edgbaston, the bowlers - principally Anderson - have filled their boots with alacrity. But in Australia's only innings at Cardiff, and then for long and untroubled spells in the second innings of the next two Tests, they have rumbled along with barely a moment's alarm, as the series century count - currently 6-1 in their favour - amply testifies.
"When a wicket's flat, it's flat, and it's very hard to conjure something out of nothing," said Strauss, which is why Flintoff's bone-jarring performance at Lord's stands out for the manner in which it bucked the trend. But for that very reason, there is simply no point in playing him if he is anything less than 100% fit. England, to give them their due, have said that all throughout this saga, but at the same time, it will take a gutsy call to withdraw him so close to the finishing line, with absolutely everything at stake - including his own legacy in Test retirement.
"I think we can cope without him," said Strauss. "We've had to do it a number of times in the last two years, so it wouldn't be anything new to us. Generally the bowlers have stepped up when he hasn't played, but at the moment he's in great nick with both ball and bat, so we don't want to play without him if we can help it. You have to swing with the punches you get, and if [he's unfit] we've got a good enough squad to be able to deal with that."
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