Rain here was always a phantom of English, and cricketing, imagination © Getty Images

Text messages began arriving from friends in England about 6am. Could I stick my hand out the window and check for raindrops? Alas, the curtains parted to reveal a cloudless sky. Weather in Queensland doesn’t have the famous consistency of that experienced in the Pennines, but rain here was always a phantom of English imagination, based more on the electrical storm that curtailed a one-sided Ashes Test eight years ago than on instinctive feeling for local meteorology.

Trusting in the efficacy of a timely rain these days, too, is a little like believing in the Cottingley Fairies. Rain seldom exerts the influence on Tests as of yore. Games unfold so speedily, and so frequently involve mismatches, that even a lost day is insufficient to make avert the inevitable. The last Test verifiably ruined by rain was the knife-edge contest between Australia and India at Chennai just over two years ago. It wasn’t rain that held Australia up at the Oval in 2005 but bad light, thanks to the fixture’s lateness in the summer. Mind you, ‘Is It Cowardly to Pray for Bad Light?’ (2005) wouldn’t have made such an apt title for Rob Smyth’s delicious book.

Brisbane used to have fabulous reputation for rain, the Ashes Tests of 1928, 1936, 1946 and 1950 spiralling down the drain for whomever was the butt of the conditions. So farcical was the last, featuring one day in which twenty wickets fell for 120 runs, that Marylebone requested Brisbane’s removal from the rota of Test match venues ‘for climatic and financial reasons’; the Australian Board of Control for International Cricket insisted that the Gabba remain, ‘in the interests of Australian cricket’. These interests were well served when Australia, under pitiless sun, won the next Test there by an innings and 154 runs.

There has been some harking back to that Test in the last week, the Sunday Times among others invoking the example of Frank Tyson as a possible inspiration for Steve Harmison, the Douglas Corrigan of fast bowling. But the belief in the significance historical antecedents is perhaps even emptier than the trust in rain. How many series, and games, and careers, genuinely parallel another, in anything other than the most superficial senses? Cricket, of course, is a game replete with superstitions. But as one who has put his left pad on first for decades and still hardly made a run, I can assure you that they are not much help and little consolation.

	Police have been administering the Killjoy Act with the help of CCTV © Getty Images

Great concern this summer attended the arrival of the Barmy Army, whose songs, chants and general bonhomie, it was feared, would drown out Australian fans, and render Tests inhospitable – or, at least, interfere with time-honoured parochialism and partisanship which Aussies regard as the natural state of things.

In fact, both the Army and their antipodean rivals have here been kept well and truly under a pretty coarse thumb by the police, administering the Killjoy Act with the help of CCTV. Only Pat Buchanan is more hostile to the Mexican wave than the potentates of the Gabba. Yet Cricket Australia is poorly placed to be pointing the finger at anyone – it is looming as a far more exasperating noise polluter than any group of fans.

Those at home moaning about the ad breaks and Greig-o-grams on Channel Nine are actually getting off lightly; I have hardly known a noisier Test match. Even the first morning, when one might have expected a breathless hush in the close, was punctuated by deafening advertisements and pointless announcements on the public address system. No cricketer on the field has been celebrated so lustily as ‘the lovely Sheree and her team from 3’, the corporate nymphs and dryads distributing the main sponsor's bounty, while the loudest voices have been of Talking Boony, Talking Beefy and Talking Bollocks – the bonehead at the microphone who lets us in to such milestones as Ricky Ponting’s 9000th Test run, of which he informed the fact-starved masses in the middle of an over on the third afternoon.

Pop songs begin playing at 8am every day – or to be precise, they’ve been playing when I’ve arrived at that time, and they may well be on an endless 24-hour loop, deafening the cleaners as well. At various intervals, the crowd has also been serenaded by the troubadour Greg Champion. His rendition of a puerile anti-Pom jingle to the tune of The Lion Sleeps Tonight – ‘They whinge away, they whinge away, they whinge away, they whinge away, they whinge away, they whinge away (repeat * 445) – at least drew an apology from Queensland Cricket’s CEO Graham Dixon. The rest of it has been beyond sorry, and into the realm of unforgivable.

How badly does Australia cricket need the cash, that they should be have surrendered their temple to the money-lenders? Before the Test, patrons were invited to report to the authorities anyone noisy and uncouth enough to interfere with the enjoyment of others. The trouble is that, at the Gabba, the authorities have been noisiest and uncouth of all. Is it too late for me to dob in Cricket Australia?

	'Ponting's four-man attack have a lot of hard yakka ahead – well, some anyway' © Getty Images

The Ashes embodies cricket’s most traditional format: five five-day Tests played in white by daylight. Yet this has been fitted into a decidedly untraditional tour, the most anticipated series of modern times being shoehorned into six weeks, beginning with an unprecedented double header.

For the most part, this has been England’s problem, with only three second-class practice matches to prepare for back-to-back Tests - rather like trying to soup up a Go Kart to compete at the drag racing strip with the addition of some GT stripes. At the Gabba today, it became Australia’s, blessed with a first-innings lead of 445, but burdened with the choice of whether to enforce the follow-on.

Twelve years ago I was at the Gabba when Mark Taylor, with a lead of 259, and England’s openers Mike Atherton and Alec Stewart reaching for their pads, decided to bat again. Not quite the combination of Rommel and Mandela he later became, having not yet captained Australia to a Test victory, Taylor was roundly criticised for removing the Aussie boot from the pommie throat. In fact, he was probably ahead of the game. Not so long before he had enforced the follow-on against Pakistan at Rawalpindi and seen them bat Australia out of the game, Salim Malik putting his bat where his money had been with a masterful 237. Taylor reasoned that the eclipse of the rest day militated against bowling in consecutive innings, and also that his primo bowler, Warne, was advantaged by bowling on an older pitch – the whiz kid proved him right with his Test best 8-71. I remember Taylor confronted by one of his critics at the press conference afterwards, who insisted that England would have been psychologically destroyed by the follow-on. ‘Yeah,’ said the Tubmeister drolly. ‘I read that.’

What applied then applied trebly so in this Test. Reduced to four bowlers by the inclusion of Michael Clarke for the injured Shane Watson, Ponting would in choosing to bat again have been thinking ahead to the Adelaide Test that follows hot on this one’s heels. His four-man attack have a lot of hard yakka ahead – well, some anyway.

England would have been thinking ahead too. The first team to win a Test has been the team to take the Ashes in twenty-four of the thirty-one post-war series, and most of the seven comebacks were in an era when tours allowed space and scope to regroup after an initial defeat, 2005 being the glorious exception proving the rule. Even then the itinerary allowed nine days for England to regain its savoire faire. No such luck this time. Test cricket might be the longest of games, but England could be 2-0 down before it can draw a breath.

Sometimes you arrive at a cricket ground wondering if the day’s play will offer anything worth writing about; other days you are greeted by decision like the omission of Monty Panesar from England’s XI and there’s scarcely need to see a ball. Of course, you could see it coming a mile off, Duncan Fletcher’s three weeks of purse-mouthed pragmatism having softened watchers up. Yet it was somehow still a shock to be handed the England team sheet today: not quite a suicide note to rank with the 1983 Labour manifesto, but a failure of nerve and imagination.

Against Australia, thirty-three-year-old Giles averages 15 with the bat and 52 with the ball. He is an honest cricketer who has never disgraced himself, but he has not played a first-class game this year. Yet he has walked back into the England team at the expense of the world’s best orthodox finger spinner, nine years his junior, chiefly on the basis of his ancillary capabilities with the bat and in the field. It’s like a restaurant choosing a short-order cook over a chef de cuisine on the grounds he makes a better cup of tea. If a modest lengthening of the batting were sought, Sajid Mahmood would arguably have been the better bet – into the bargain, he would have been more adept than Anderson with the old ball. Any ball, if today was much to go by.

There’s no ignoring that Australia has an incontestable edge in its order from number seven onwards: Gilchrist, Warne and Lee are probably the best batting trio in their respective roles in the world. This edge, though, is so little narrowed by Giles’s selection that the gesture is scarcely worth making, and hardly at all at the cost of a bowler in Panesar who, as Flintoff noted yesterday, ‘gets good batsmen out’. This, I suspect, was the selection of a team for its appearance on paper rather than its efficacy in a match. In Ray Illingworth, England were said to have a ‘one-man committee’; Fletcher might be auditioning for the role of ‘one-man bureaucracy’.

After pondering Panesar, of course, it was on with the game, Steve Harmison’s first ball wide probably being worth a thousand words or two as well. The toss has conferred on Australia a considerable advantage – all the more reason to lament that England yielded them another at the selection table.