Poms gloat as Aussies lick wounds

"Can we play you for the Ashes now, Ricky?" was the cutting headline in the Daily Mail after Australia's shocker in the first innings at Headingley. While a sustained fightback, aided by Pakistan's frailties, almost resulted in the great escape in the second Test, the Poms liked the look of what they saw from the two Tests they hosted - particularly the stunning collapse for 88 all out. I felt that was more a story of the high-class seam bowling, in particular the devastating late movement that Aamer, Asif and Gul gained, but it did not look good to see our batsmens' techniques being found so wanting. The two-Test series against Pakistan had some positives, but also failed to answer some persistent worries. On the plus side of the ledger were the assured debuts of Steve Smith and Tim Paine; and the belated realisation by Shane Watson that he is not Dennis Lillee, he should never try to bounce people, but should in fact slow down, put the ball in the must-play zone and let it do something. The debit side had no centuries, further signs of shakiness in the middle order and no indication that the Mitchell Johnson problem is anywhere near solved. None of the batsmen really nailed it in the series, with only five half-centuries from the specialists. Hussey and North remain major concerns at Nos. five and six. Hussey will beat up the weaker Test attacks, but is no longer anywhere near reliable enough for the heat of an Ashes kitchen. North had a career day-out with the ball at Lord's but I think we've seen enough of North now to know that he simply goes with the flow of the innings: if a platform has been built when he comes in, he will help to extend it - but if a collapse is on, he will join it. So we have serious things to think about there. With the ball, I find myself again bewildered by Johnson. Most Test bowlers have the occasional bad day, but Johnson has turned that completely around: his aberrations are now the days he gets it right. He was good in the first innings at Lord's, but then reverted to tripe for the rest of the series. We cannot let this continue to happen. What goes on in the inner sanctum? Are they concerned about Johnson? You would never know: all references to him are prefaced by acknowledgements of the (ludicrous) ICC World Cricketer of the Year, or inane descriptions like "strike bowler", but in reality, while waiting for that one in 10 innings when he hits his straps, the attack has one member inoperative. The spin coming from the camp is reassuring, but anyone with eyes can see that he has become 90 per cent liability, 10 per cent asset. We will have Siddle back for the Ashes and the selectors have also signalled that Peter George and Josh Hazlewood are in the frame. At some point soon, the question of whether the team can continue to carry Johnson must be faced. The upcoming visit to India will be very important for several players: a team that worships consistency of make-up would have wanted to have a settled line-up heading into the Ashes - but carrying passengers is not on.

Relief and vindication competed to dominate Matthew Knights' post-game demeanour on Saturday night, and the latter won. A pumped-up Knights went firmly on to the front foot in defending his Bombers and lauding their efforts to beat North, which is fine, but like Marcus North, he lunged too hard at the ball. The effect of six tough weeks in the bunker showed with Knights' clenched-jaw rhetoric about "finding out who had stood with the club" and who had not. It was classic coach stuff, the verbal stick-that-up-your-jumper to the critics: in Essendon's case, a bandwagon that had swelled in passengers like Christmas Island over the preceding six weeks. But Knights should not shoot the messengers. Welcome as it was, all that Essendon did on Saturday night was play as a self-respecting AFL team should do. Knights' implication - that Essendon people (read James Hird) had sledged his team treacherously, had been caught doing so and would no longer be viewed by the club as suitably loyal - completely missed the point. The criticism that the team had copped over the last six weeks from the outside was deserved: its performances had slid from the unlucky (round 11 at the SCG) to the utterly uncompetitive, particularly over rounds 13-16. In fact, the last three losses, to Adelaide, Melbourne and West Coast, had been so spiritless that speculation about a wooden spoon was justified, unless the club turned it around on the field. They did, and Knights was entitled to his triumphant reaction on Saturday. But he has got to get some perspective: to expect any football commentator, let alone an Essendon great, to pull punches in describing Essendon's yelpless efforts in those three games - he is dreaming. He is entitled to resent Kevin Sheedy's sniping from afar - people forget that the team played in the same manner too often in Sheedy's final few years, and he recruited much of the current personnel - but Matthew, James Hird spoke the way he did because he loves Essendon to his core: which is why five consecutive capitulations galled him, and however many million others. In fact, what would have been treachery from Hird would have been failing to state - publicly and emphatically - that what your team was serving up was nowhere near acceptable or excusable.

The strange concept of the team in Formula One is in the spotlight again after Ferrari ordered Felipe Massa to give Fernando Alonso precedence at Hockenheim at the weekend. The fairytale story would have been to let Massa win on the track where he broke his skull a year ago. The Ferrari garage had no such sentimental vision, ordering the Brazilian out of the way. In this manner they effectively broke the rules. But they are in the business of winning a championship, and Alonso is their stronger chance to do that. So the US$100,000 fine for breaching regulations in organising the order of finishing was a slap on the hand with a warm lettuce leaf. Massa is taking one for the team, saying it was his decision to let Alonso pass him, but no-one believes that. The tweaking done by Ferrari was nowhere near as bad as plenty of other instances of race management any fan could name - such as the disgraceful decision the same team took in 2002 to deny Rubens Barrichello a win in Austria, solely to accommodate Michael Schumacher's ego - and in truth, Ferrari is facing a situation in which one of its drivers is not as competitive as the other. Ferrari faces different decisions to, say, Red Bull, which has Mark Webber and Sebastian Vettel both in with a title chance. Only Alonso can win the title for Ferrari, he has had some problems with stewards, he needed maximum points - end of story. Both the fine and the way it looked was incidental.

A case to SANZAR

SANZAR, the body that oversees the Super 14 and Tri-Nations rugby tournaments, has to get its judiciary system right. The fact that South Africa's provincial Currie Cup season is being played means that suspensions in the Tri-Nations tournament for Springboks players can be amortised across Currie Cup games, where the Boks players could theoretically have been selected. The New Zealanders can use this out, too, but Australia cannot. Which means that Quade Cooper's suspension from Saturday night's match, for two games, means that he will miss the next two Tri-Nations tests. In contrast, Springbok centre Jaque Fourie, who copped a four-match ban after being cited for a dangerous tackle in the same game, will only miss one Tri-Nations match, because he also "misses" three Currie Cup games. The anomaly that makes an ostensibly stiffer sentence actually more lenient will be the major plank of Australia's case when it takes Cooper's suspension to the SANZAR appeals tribunal, but don't hold your breath in expectation of any consistency. It is greatly peeving for Wallaby supporters because Cooper was at his customary electric best on Saturday night, running the ball at the Springboks and mesmerising them constantly with his tricks. Australia is a far better team with him at five-eighth than anyone else in the squad, because he is completely unpredictable, and opens up multiple chinks in the opposition line through his freakish ability to pass the ball. The South Africans certainly could not handle him and the New Zealanders are also vulnerable to Cooper, who has never played them in a Test. You have to wonder why he put himself into the referee's (and the tribunal's) hands with a dumb and careless tackle: unlike the serial lift-and-throw merchants among the South Africans, Cooper knows better.