Strauss on the Back Foot Batting to Save His Test Career

Andrew Strauss, an intelligent man as well as a fine sportsman, may have been more keenly aware than his fellows that an aeon has passed here in two days. The high summer heat of Friday and Saturday had surrendered to autumn. A Test series had been lost. Even Big Ben's resonant, comforting chimes had fallen silent.

As he walked out to bat in lengthening shadows at 4.58pm yesterday Strauss may have felt not so much the encroachment of autumn as the chilly blast of midwinter. For the vagaries of an English winter is what he faces if, as many people suspect, he is going to spared the the humidity of Galle, Colombo and Kandy in Sri Lanka.

For all his urgent positiveness, the articulate assertions that all his well, Strauss has been unable to dispel the notion that his game is in turmoil and will probably remain so until he is afforded a sabbatical.

When he scored 96 at Lord's in the opening Test of this series he may have thought that he had silenced his critics, though deep down, with the faulty footwork that plagued that innings, he must have known better.

When he followed that with a half-century at Trent Bridge he probably felt he was well on the way to a successful series. But then came that rash stroke that brought his dismissal, just as another, poor in conception as well as execution, brought his downfall here on Friday evening after India had compiled 664.

Andrew Flintoff , everyone knows, is on the way back. And even though England feel less confident these days about their champion batting at No6, that is where proper all-rounders play, how real balance is achieved. That would mean dropping a batsman and Strauss is favorite, with Michael Vaughan moving back to open.

Strauss is a back-foot player, a cutter and puller of such panache that he has never been dropped since making his Test debut at Lord's three years ago and going on to reach 1,000 runs in record time.

But he has never been an adept player of swing bowling. And this has been a summer for swingers. If only he could be more like Graham Thorpe, who can only remember opening the innings once for Surrey but who played the ball late with soft hands.

Since scoring a century at Headingley last August he has scored 686 runs in 24 Test innings at an average of 28.60. In 40 innings he has not scored a century for England in any form of the game and has already been dropped from the one-day side.

All this and more passed through his troubled mind yesterday as he fielded, for that strange period of four hours and one minute, after Rahul Dravid had decided not to enforce the follow-on - the man known as The Wall inviting a splash of graffiti even from India supporters, who wanted to see England beaten in style.

This was a bizarre passage of play, cavity-filling of sorts, while India consolidated, nervously, after Dravid had decided that winning the match was less important than winning the series, even though defeat was not realistically possible after their first innings score.

Strauss was not sufficiently distracted by his plight to drop the two slip catches that came his way. But all the time he would have been contemplating his second innings here, which could be his last in Test cricket until England tour New Zealand next year. Will he be centrally contracted then?

He has scored 23 not out. A scorched-earth square-cut gleamed among many false strokes. Today he will be batting for his career.