Pietersen Verbals Can Lift England's Body Language

It was when his players faced down Matthew Hayden at Edgbaston in the one-day series preceding the Tests in 2005 that Duncan Fletcher knew England were in with a chance of recapturing the Ashes. Later on, recollecting the incident in tranquillity, the England coach would refer to it as "a seminal moment in the summer that was unfolding".

Simon Jones was fielding the ball off his own bowling when he aimed a return towards the batsman's end but hit Hayden in the chest. Infuriated, the big Australian advanced on the bowler, bellowing his recriminations.

"What happened next really pleased me," Fletcher wrote in his diary of the series. "Jones was not left on his own as he went down the pitch to apologise; not isolated like some England players have been in the past. I thought that Jones's body language was good: it was obvious that he wanted to apologise but he was also saying, 'You're not intimidating me.' His team-mates rushed to his side. We had talked about that - not about conducting mass verbal jousts, of course, but about putting the Australians in their place if they came at us aggressively. This is what Hayden did. He was the one trying to intimidate."

Fletcher saw Paul Collingwood rush to Jones's side, followed by Andrew Strauss and Michael Vaughan. "I thought they did it in a classy way - if classy is the right word ... It was not roughhouse behaviour. Rather, they told Hayden exactly what they thought and that was it. And Hayden was out lbw - to a beautiful Jones inswinger - not long after."

In Fletcher's view, England's moment of defiance came as a shock to the Australians. "There had been a psychological shift in pressure and pride," he wrote. "They now knew they were in for a battle." Twelve days later England's bowlers had five Australian batsmen back in the pavilion before lunch on the first day of the Lord's Test, and the battle was on.

There could hardly be a more marked contrast with the listlessness that marked England's performance in the opening exchanges in Brisbane last week, a phenomenon seen too often since the triumph of 2005. A year ago Ian Botham criticised the team's approach in his Daily Mirror column after watching them lose a one-day match to Pakistan in Karachi by a record 165 runs. "The body language was shocking," he wrote. "It made me cringe."

Steve Harmison's now legendary opening delivery in Brisbane last week certainly did nothing to establish an aggressive intent. The suggestion of meekness was reinforced when Harmison and Ashley Giles later confessed to suffering from nerves. The Australians, by contrast, came out as though they had been conserving every last drop of testosterone for that moment and were now using it to fuel their confident and adventurous batting.

Even in defeat at Lord's 16 months earlier England had attempted to impose themselves from the start. "Go flat-out at them," Fletcher has said, "no holds barred." But when Australia took the field towards the end of the second day in Brisbane their briskness during the changeovers made their opponents' attitude look sluggish, as Ponting intended.

There was an incident on the third day, however, that might have encouraged Fletcher. It involved Kevin Pietersen and Shane Warne, and it took place when England, at 164 for three in their second innings, were showing the first tentative signs of recovering a measure of self-respect. Pietersen had just hit Warne for two fours in consecutive balls when the leg-spinner fielded the ball and hurled it in the direction of the batsman. Protecting himself, Pietersen deflected the ball before letting his friend and Hampshire colleague know what he thought of him.

Here was an England player meeting fire with fire, and a lot more of that sort of thing will be needed in the coming weeks. It underlined the status of Pietersen as the Owen Hargreaves of the side, a player not born or raised in England and unwilling to emulate the readiness of some of his native-bred colleagues to drop their heads and accept humiliation. Such a judgment might seem unfair on Andrew Flintoff and Collingwood, in particular, not to mention the absent Vaughan. The rest of the team, however, would do well to draw from the bottomless well of Pietersen's confidence.

"Everyone's trying to up the intensity," Matthew Hoggard said after yesterday's net practice at the Test ground. "In the last two days at Brisbane we showed that we can compete. We've got our backs against the wall, as we had in England last year. We came out and fought then, and that's exactly what we've got to do this time. It's at the start of something big that you get the nerves. We're past that now and we're ready to turn it round."

Different teams evolve in different ways. It may be that Ponting's ageing side will prove unable to sustain their initial level of aggression, while Flintoff's men set aside their passive start and rise to meet the challenge over the next few weeks. Not every card needs to be played in the first of five matches, and testing the limits of sportsmanship is not the only way to demonstrate competitiveness. But an early show of spirit tomorrow would do England the world of good.