The first of McGrath’s spells was faultless

So much for all the expectations. On the evidence of the first Test match, the gap between England’s cricket and that of Australia is very nearly as wide as when they previously met and as it will remain for as long as Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne continue to bowl as well as they did last week.

The counterparts to these two in the England team are Matthew Hoggard and Ashley Giles: Hoggard, who won a Test match in Johannesburg in January, and Giles, who played no small part in England’s successful run against the West Indies in the Caribbean in the winter of 2003-04, New Zealand and West Indies in England last summer and in South Africa last winter.

They have been earning their keep and are an integral part of England’s plans. They have character and determination. And at Lord’s, they found that what passes against all other teams is not enough against Ricky Ponting’s Australians, let alone when the catches go down.

I shudder to think what may lie in store. In better conditions for batting than prevailed at Lord’s, England should put together some decent totals; but so, in spades, will Australia.

With the Lord’s slope to favour them, McGrath and Warne were fiendishly good. I do not remember a Test match there when the slope ? about eight feet from the Grandstand boundary down to the Tavern boundary and something more than an inch across the width of a pitch ? seemed to play such an identifiable part. To make the most of it, though, the ball has to be genuinely spun or to hit the seam at the right angle and on the right length.

The first of McGrath’s spells in the match was a well-nigh faultless exhibition of fast bowling ? not fiercely fast, but still more Statham than Bedser.

There has never been another Warne, though. In the history of the game, no one has mastered, to the same extent and with the same constancy, the extraordinarily difficult art of wrist spin.

To go to the wicket in one’s first proper Test match at Lord’s (Bangladesh not being proper) to face Warne before a full house with England in trouble and the ball turning and to the audible derision of an overbearing Australia team must be about as near to a living nightmare as a cricketer can get. That was Ian Bell’s lot in England’s second innings and, hardly surprisingly, it was too much for him, fine young player though he is.

It was a different matter from going in a county championship match at the Rose Bowl, with Warne playing for Hampshire and Bell for Warwickshire. If one is demanding, the other is incomparably daunting.

Give Warne to England and England might not win because of the power of Australia’s batting, but they would sleep a lot more soundly.

For match after match, Warne has suggested the sword of Damocles. Which makes the wildly talented Kevin Pietersen’s contribution with the bat at Lord’s the more notable.

Even allowing for the fact that he has been playing for Hampshire with Warne and therefore had the chance to become familiar with his wiles, the way he dealt with him at this level was auspicious.

Thanks to Pietersen, I saw, within the space of five minutes on Friday, one of the most startling strokes and one of the best boundary catches I have witnessed.

The first was a straight drive into the pavilion off McGrath, and not just into the pavilion but up against the first balcony; the second was an amazing effort by Damien Martyn, running flat out to his left in front of the Grandstand and diving full-length to hold the ball with two hands, inches inside the rope.

For being so brilliantly athletic and within the scope only of someone who is exceptionally fit, this was very much a catch of the times.