Uncertainty is a glorious feature of cricket – except occasionally when you’re writing about it. Such an occasion has just been had, when almost to a man the media consigned the Adelaide Test to the oblivion of a drawn, only to see Ricky Ponting’s team turn around and win it. I didn’t explicitly tip a draw, but I didn’t think Ponting had done enough to win it – nor did I think Australia really deserved to. I’ll leave being wise after the event to others. It’s time to grab that mirror and take a good hard look at myself!

I didn’t think England would be as bad as at Brisbane. In fact, they were better for four days and hugely worse on the last, so I can’t take much credit for that. I didn’t think the toss would be decisive, any more than it was during the very similar Test here three years ago between Australia and India; on the other hand, I also believed that Australia had been shut out of the game by the second evening. Poor mad fool.

In a podcast before the game, I said that Les Burdett prepared his pitches with a result in mind in the last hour of the last day, and I thought the pitch played pretty fairly throughout: the best bowlers of the first four days, Clark and Hoggard, got the results. So I refrained from writing a ‘these pitches are destroying Test cricket’ piece. Phew.

Mind you, I also expressed the belief that Australia on the fourth day had reverted to a bad habit of indulging individuals at the game’s expense, and dawdled towards the end of their innings, intent on preserving their series lead rather than striving to extend it: an admission of some weakness. I was surprised that Ponting didn’t do more to make England uncomfortable, whether by pushing on more obviously, declaring earlier, or opening the bowling in the second innings with Warne supported by a flock of close-in fielders, perhaps with Clark at the other end. I expected Warne to be a threat on the last day, but didn’t believe he’d been given enough time to do his thing. So I bollocksed that up. Actually, this wasn’t one of those relentlessly efficient Australian wins of yore. Five players contributed next to nothing. The batting is frightfully dependent on Ponting and Hussey. The bowling is still reliant on Warne’s varying humours; McGrath’s spell on Tuesday was embarrassing. But by golly, they trailed that whiff of victory like a bloodhound, a veritable Hound of the Baskervilles.

In one of his famous Roses despatches, Neville Cardus reported wending his way home after a disastrous Yorkshire collapse at Headingley, and being accosted at Leeds railway station by a local eager for the cricket score. Lancastrian Cardus perkily reported that Yorkshire had been rounded up for less than 100 and slumped to heavy defeat. His interlocutor looked grave. After a pause, he said finally: ‘They did that, did they? Ah thowt better of them.’ Well, having seen them play with such spunk and spirit last year, I thought better of England. You always overvalue that which you see with your own eyes. Having not seen England choke in similar circumstances at Multan a year ago, I did not factor it in as a precedent. This leads me to suspect that we’ve all underestimated the significance of Michael Vaughan, behind whose veneer of civility lurks a far steelier individual than Andrew Flintoff. Vaughan would not have trotted out Flintoff’s daft line of reasoning last night, that the match was pretty good for England because they dominated so much of it. England’s good cricket doesn’t redeem its failure; it makes the failure worse.

	John Warr © The Cricketer International

When twenty-three-year-old Cambridge fast bowler John Warr arrived in Sydney with Freddie Brown’s MCC side of 1950-51, a Sydney wharf labourer hailed him. ‘Hey Warr, he shouted, ‘you’ve got as much chance of taking a test wicket on this tour as I have of pushing a pound of butter up a parrot's arse with a hot needle.' The labourer was wrong. Warr took exactly one, for 281 runs. Mind you, it was a close run thing: the umpire looked like giving Ian Johnson not out when he nicked to Godfrey Evans at Adelaide Oval, before Johnson decided he could not ignore the pitiable sag of Warr’s shoulders.

This summer, the parrot and butter standard faces another test, from Jimmy Anderson. His figures were one for 280 today when he managed to dismiss Glenn McGrath, and halve his average. The haircut is the same as four years ago; perhaps in recuperating from he stress fractures that kept him out of the last English season, he has lost the whip that gave him pace and away swing. Pitches with bounce but without pace have led him to bowl too short – a costly error. He is in danger of becoming a cipher in this series, if indeed he bowls again. It is a bad sign when a bowler’s presence reminds you of another’s absence, as Anderson’s does Simon Jones with every innocuous over.

Warr famously never had difficulty recalling his Test figures, able to rely on his memory of Hymn #281: ‘Art thou weary, art thou languid/Art thou sore distressed?/
“Come to Me,” saith One/“And coming, Be at rest”.’ Anderson can draw inspiration at the moment of Hymn #140: ‘Great is thy faithfulness.’ He’s going to need it.

	Panesar superstar © Getty Images

The Shot That Echoed Round the World: You’d have sworn Monty Panesar was preparing himself for a triumphant return to the colours. He was on the arena before play undertaking a solo fielding routine – with disarming athleticism, what’s more. Word that he had not made the XI reached our overflow eyrie at about 9.30am, when the phone of my Guardian colleague Lawrence Booth delivered itself of a text message from his fiancée in England: ‘I can’t believe they haven’t picked Monty.’ Lawrence harrumphed: ‘How come she knows and we don’t? She’s in Cambridge. And she doesn’t even like cricket.’

The Song That Echoed In My Ears: Cricket Australia may have barred Barmy bugler Billy Cooper from the Test, but what will they do about the manglings of ‘God Save The Queen’ by their chanteuse of choice Amy Pearson, who insists on wringing the Britain’s anthem for bathos, as though she’s belting out ‘The Greatest Love of All’? Heaven knows, it’s probably the B-side for her disco version of ‘Amazing Grace’. But can someone please tell her that it’s an anthem, not a torch song?

Fielder Watch: Michael Hussey hardly touched a ball in the first session, yet covered more miles than anyone, for much of the time traipsing from deep square leg to deep square leg, with a detour to convey the bowler’s cap and glasses to the umpire: a plan, perhaps, to expend some of the kid-drunk-on-red-cordial energy for which Mr Cricket is renowned.

Fielder Watch 2: Had Hussey had been at mid-off in the last over, Kevin Pietersen would have squandered his good work, and wasted much of Paul Colingwood’s. As it was, Glenn McGrath showed his age for the first time this season, and could not quite bridge the distance. On such chances of field placing can whole games hinge.

Attire of the Day: The Observer’s droll columnist Kevin Mitchell, a fine writer and one of the gentlemen of the tour, has been flaunting his Australian upbringing this summer, his guide to Aussie Rhyming Slang a tour de force of either archaeology or imagination. Today his residual Aussieness was put to the test by a SACA jobsworth who insisted that he needed a collar to enter the media area. Kevin emerged from the merchandising tent in a ‘Go Off In Green and Gold’ polo shirt, pulling it off with surprising aplomb. The expenses claim will need explaining, though.

Sign of the Day: Operating instructions in the upright urinals beneath the Favell-Dansie Indoor Cricket Centre. ‘Aim Below. Stop. Think.’ In that order. The first I can understand. The second seems superfluous. The third is the most intriguing of all. Think about what? How deeply? For how long?

‘Mate, are you finished there? I’m busting.’ - ‘I’m sorry, I’m still thinking.’

It reminded me of the sign that Mike Brearley noticed in the dressing room at the SCG, which he describes in The Ashes Retained (1979): ‘Remove clothes before using shower.’ What would be the consequences of not doing so? Brearley wondered. And why would the authority responsible for the sign care?

Hey, they didn’t even score at three runs an over. Waddya want? Cardus?

	A little bit of home © Getty Images

Adelaide Oval is routinely, if not rather unimaginatively, considered the most picturesque of Australian cricket grounds. Indeed, it takes that status rather for granted, and like a self-regarding beauty queen has been rather letting itself go these past few years. The Eastern Stand has damn all to recommend it; the profusion of canopies apparently inspired by Jean Paul Gaultier’s famous bra – think Madonna, on her ‘Blonde Ambition’ tour - don’t do much for the eye either. At least, though, the ground is not hemmed in by the skyscraper stands so popular elsewhere. Its communal benches and grassy verges defy the trend to one-bum, one-seat tyranny, while the 1912-vintage scoreboard provides a pleasing sense of continuity. Cricket in Adelaide, too, will always sound enchanting on radio: with bowlers operating from either the River or the Cathedral Ends, you could almost be listening to a broadcast from England.

In all, it is a ground on a scale and of a character a little more congenial to English visitors. There is something for Andrew Flintoff’s team to build on here, too, even if the conjecture about Glenn McGrath’s injury seemed like something calculated to help the Barmy Army’s morale, rather than seriously to incommode Australia. They had the better of the game against South Australia. The pitch will probably not deteriorate fast enough to deviate significantly for Warne: benign weather in the mid-20s is expected. We’ve even had a little rain, which briefly rinsed the outfield yesterday, the ground staff hastening to protect the pitch and the sponsors’ symbols on the outfield – fortunately in that order.

So, with a favouring breeze and a ration of good fortune, England could work their way back into the series here tomorrow. The toss may not even be quite so loaded as it was in Brisbane. The team batting second has led at half-way in three of the last six Tests, and Australia lost here three years ago despite making 556 in their first innings, 400 of them on the first day. The alternative? If England lose in Adelaide, at least Michael Vaughan can stop worrying about a comeback to Test cricket in this series. There won’t be any point.