The Ashes: Spot the Winners and Losers: Vaughan Drained, Ponting Positive

Michael Vaughan called the result "a fantastic achievement". Ricky Ponting said his side had been on the verge of an "unbelievable win". But superlatives can be misleading, and after one of the tightest finishes in 129 years of Test cricket, the impression was that neither captain had quite got to grips with the madness of it all.

If Vaughan had the drawn but relieved look of a man who had just come through a near-death experience, Ponting spoke with the jauntiness of one who refuses to believe in mortality at all. Who had won and who had lost? Appearances were deceptive.

"I actually feel quite happy at the moment," said Ponting, almost convincingly. "I'm pretty proud of the way we played over the last couple of days. There are probably a couple of batters in there - Kasper and Brett - who feel quite shattered but all the guys have made it clear to them that we're really happy with what they've done."

Ponting's relentlessly upbeat assessment of Australia's first defeat in a live Ashes Test for eight years was an understandable attempt to raise spirits. But there was something very un-Australian about his response, especially as concerns over Glenn McGrath's fitness - he is still hoping to be fit for the fourth Test at Trent Bridge starting on August 25 - mean that Ponting must now be worried about becoming the first Australian captain since Allan Border in 1986-87 to lose the Ashes.

"I think we can take as much away from this game as England can," he said. "A game like this just makes you hungrier. Every ball you field, every chance that comes your way, every ball you bowl, every ball you face, you want to be that little bit better and sharper because you know that can be the difference."

The problem with putting on a brave face, of course, is that the mask must inevitably slip. Ponting admitted he was "wrong" to have inserted England on the first morning, when he expected more help from the conditions.

And when he was offered the choice between flattening England or taking part in the first close-run Ashes series for years, his answer was unequivocal: "I'd rather be flattening them."

It was a prospect that had occurred to Vaughan as Brett Lee and Michael Kasprowicz came within a stroke of putting Australia 2-0 up after two Tests for the seventh time out of nine. "I don't think we would have come back from 2-0 down against a team like this," he said. "It was a fitting end to a great game of cricket but I really didn't think it was going to get that close. I felt we were going to create more opportunities the nearer they got to the total. The question was: were we going to be good enough to take it? Fortunately we were."

Vaughan praised the team's character, the Edgbaston crowd - even if there were times when the nervous tension silenced them - and the exuberance of Andrew Flintoff. But underneath lay the realisation that England had come close to spoiling their own summer. Vaughan is too level-headed to say "thank God". Somehow he did not need to.

Simon Jones was fined 20% of his match fee for pointing Matthew Hayden to the pavilion after dismissing him on Saturday. It was the second time the pair have clashed at Edgbaston this summer, after Jones hurled the ball into Hayden's chest during a one-day match in June.