How England Can Fight Back in the Ashes

For the half-hour in which Geraint Jones and Ashley Giles were at the crease together yesterday, Duncan Fletcher must have had his fingers crossed even more tightly than usual. Here were the two players whose much-discussed inclusion in the team had been credited to the coach's belief in their ability to contribute important runs as well as fulfilling their primary functions as wicketkeeper and left-arm spinner respectively.

In the first innings they had passed each other in the outfield, one arriving as the other departed. Jones scored 19, while Giles was last out for 24. In the second innings the former compiled a fighting 33 while the latter made 23. Their seventh-wicket partnership contributed 33. As for the rest of their contribution, Jones took one catch to dismiss Shane Warne off Steve Harmison's bowling while Giles took a single wicket, that of Damien Martyn.

Hardly earth-shattering stuff, and certainly not enough of a contribution to justify Fletcher's decisions to ignore the claims of Chris Read and Monty Panesar. England may be defending the Ashes, but these matches are here to be won. Boldness, aggression and the application of specialist skills are what they need if they are to fight their way back into the series. Panesar, at least, must be in the side on Friday.

When England started their second innings at the Gabba yesterday they were looking at a towering deficit of 647. In the course of 100 overs and one ball, they got a lot closer than many believed possible. But it was still like watching a bunch of mountaineers trying to scale Everest wearing Speedos and flipflops. They managed to pass a few landmarks in the foothills, but they ran out of oxygen just past the halfway mark and long before the summit was in sight.

And yet, thanks to Ricky Ponting's refusal to impose the follow-on, Andrew Flintoff and his players were given opportunities to play themselves back to the level of respectability represented by a score of 347, many of those runs scored with a surprising degree of panache. If the top-order batsmen can only eliminate the moments of rashness - such as Andrew Strauss's compulsive hooking, Flintoff's feckless slog in the second innings, and the moment of madness with which poor Collingwood denied himself a century - then they might yet make Australia's bowlers look something less than a bunch of hypnotists and snake-charmers.

England's own bowling requires more drastic measures if it is to play a part in the winning of a match in this series. No doubt the selectors will keep Harmison in the XI for the second Test, believing that the more overs he bowls, the closer he will come to recapturing his form. But the trouble with relying on re-establishing muscle-memory is that sometimes the muscles remember the wrong things, and one hopes that someone is working with Harmison to correct the flaws in his delivery so clearly shown up in television's trial by slo-mo.

One of the underlying problems is that Harmison has never delivered the ball from a stable platform, which begins when a fast bowler walks to the end of his run and turns to approach his mark. Unusually among top-class quicks, Harmison has never been bothered whether he turns to begin his run-up from the right or the left of his mark. What it means is that when he loses his groove, he has fewer signs to help him recover it. And if that is a visible indication of his problem, there are sure to be others the naked eye cannot detect.