The Third Test

At the time of the paper round following the heartwrenching Edgbaston test, the media hailed the duel as the "greatest of all time", "thrilling", "dramatic". To get so close to the target and fall short by two runs no doubt must have made for an extremely palpitating match. Following last evening's draw at Old Trafford the same adjectives were in circulation once again. The only difference was that I was witness to the final hours of play of the Old Trafford test -- there when Pointing had not yet completed his century and Clarke was middling the ball amply well all the world having forgotten about his back problem. BBC's Test Match Special was missing Blofeld for the entire test and it was not quite the same listening to CMJ and Jonathan Agnew along with Geoff Lawson calling the match but it just had to make do.

Of course with 399 runs to make towards a possible successful chase and ten wickets to take towards a tubthumping 2-1 series lead, the stakes were high for the last day's play. Surely England knew the match was theirs to lose when Clarke got out to a stunner of a delivery from Jones leaving Australia at 263/6 or when Gillespie played and missed so many and finally -- hapless as he had been -- got caught in the cross-hairs of the umpire's view of the wicket, or when Warne nearly perished were it not for a hard untaken chance. It could not be forever that the elements would be in Australia's favour -- the third day's rain was plentiful enough. Unfortunately for them though, Ponting's need to survive and hold together was overwhelmingly more significant than their own desire to stitch it all up. As Warne fell after a dogged show, Ponting must no doubt have realised Australia was looking at the short end.

It is a strange testament then to his gritty, clinging and gnarly knock that the magnitude of his innings was not felt until a few moments of pause after the draw was eked out. Even in those last ten overs of the day's play -- six of which he managed to stay in the middle of -- when the voice crackling over the hushed din of spectators to accentuate the growing tension told us of anxious English laptops in internet cafés in Vietnam, frantic Australian desktops explaining the game as tersely as possible to Hungarian girlfriends, none of us was ready to gauge Ponting's metier. It scarcely mattered that he had come in at the eighth ball of the day and had faced all the pummelling from Flintoff and party while wickets at the other end 'kept going regularly', it impressed none that the captain of his team had collected a heroic hundred-and-fifty in the most bloodiest of battlegrounds -- all that mattered was that Australia somehow would not lose any more wickets. And then, Ponting fell. He fell because he wanted to save strike for himself, nobody cared that Lee had been in exactly this situation a week ago and handled the pressure so extraordinarily well albeit unluckily. Chaitanya had joined me in my office by this time -- and both of us agreed how tough it was going to be for the Aussies to come back from a 1-2 deficit. The Australians were hoping for a miracle, Chaitanya's hands were trembling, McGrath and Lee at crease.

And in the final over, McGrath faced Harmison -- could it have been scripted any differently given this tour's cachet of death-defying stunts and nearly unpermutable scenarios? Ball after ball as the tense voice called them, one island in the Northern Hemisphere hoped for a delivery from Harmison so fierce that it would blast McGrath's willow to bits and another island in the South prayed for one so benign and forlorn that McGrath would merely be required to defer. The romantics prefer the underdogs and McGrath survived and even got a single. Lee had to face the next three balls and all of a sudden the sun began to shine. The three balls still took an excruciatingly long time but the Aussies had done it and England sadly had to acquiesce -- but it was sweet poetic justice considering how close they had come to losing the Edgbaston test.

Lest I be accused of being a closet-colonialist, I must say that it was nearly as gripping and delirious as the Melbourne test, the Sydney test, the great Calcutta test and the satisfying Madras test. But it was every bit the more compelling to follow from an impartial true Test-enthusiast's perspective and every bit the more fascinating to listen to on the BBC. Nine more days to go before the Trent Bridge test and I hope nobody has been keeping tabs on how abnormally excessive the thrill of following the 2005 Ashes has been.

Ball-by-ball commentary

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Australia secure nail-biting draw

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