Listen carefully and you will hear a sound unknown on these isles in over a generation. What is this strange, unfamiliar noise? Could it be the cooing of the four Great Bustard chicks so recently hatched on Salisbury plain? No. It's more of a braying, a c0cksure crowing. It sounds almost smug. More like Chauntecleer the cockerel's morning cry. It's that lesser-spotted bird, English optimism. On Test Match Special Jonathan Agnew has been gamely offering bets on England to win 3-1 this winter to any Australian who will take them. The chorus of chuckles at Australia's misfortunes have become one of the sounds of the summer. Sweet, sweet schadenfreude.
It will be hard enough to get through the next 800 words without mentioning the A-word. Never mind the next four weeks. Such is the hold of that series on the public imagination that both Australia and England have found their upcoming fixtures against India and Pakistan are being framed in terms of what they will mean for this winter's contest. Never mind that it is still four months away. Ricky Ponting has been grumbling in The Australian that the two Tests against India in Chandigarh and Bangalore are not the "ideal preparation" for what will follow, while in England the selectors' decision to omit Tim Bresnan and select Eoin Morgan in their Test 12 has been seen as a clear indication that they are preparing to play a four-man attack Down Under.
Both teams should be wary of getting ahead of themselves. Plenty can change in the space of four months. An injury to Graeme Swann or James Anderson, for instance, would throw England's strategy entirely out of kilter. In 2006 England made four personnel changes to their team between the final Test of the summer and the first of the winter, as well as switching the captaincy and reshuffling their batting order.
And lessons seemingly learned these last few weeks will be less use down the line. Anyone who imagines that Doug Bollinger and Mitchell Johnson, for instance, will be as ineffective on the harder, bouncier wickets of their own country as they were at Lord's and Headingley is deluded. The Kookaburra ball used in Australia is harder to swing, and overhead the skies will contain far fewer thick grey clouds than the ones that lay over Leeds. The key factors in Australia's defeat to Pakistan were the deficiencies of their batsmen's technique against swing bowling, and the inability of their attack to find the right length to exploit the movement through the air on which the Pakistanis' thrived. Neither issue is likely to play a decisive role later this year.
The more pertinent point may just be that Australia's second Test against Pakistan proved just how hard it can be for inexperienced bowlers to thrive in unfamiliar circumstance. It seems ominous that of the five bowlers in this English attack only Anderson has ever played a Test on Australian soil, and in his three matches he has taken five wickets at 82 runs apiece.
Besides which, when you look too far ahead you start to miss the obstacles in front of you. Pakistan pose their own challenges, which are easily underestimated. Man for man their bowling attack is more than a match for England's. In fact the Duke ball and the English conditions suit the Pakistani bowlers so well that there is an extent to which England's home advantage will be negated. If Pakistan had followed the advice of Wasim Akram and selected the seven-foot-tall left-armer Mohammad Irfan in their squad, then theirs would surely be the most formidable bowling unit in the game today. Simon Katich, who had more success against them than most, singled Pakistan's quartet out as "as good an attack as I have faced since the 2005 Ashes".
Where England do have an advantage is in the batting, especially towards the tail where Pakistan's bowlers can muster all of a single first class fifty between them. There are frailties too up top: Umar Akmal, who carried the side through much of their disastrous tour to Australia last winter, has found the switch to English conditions every bit as unsettling as Australia's own batsmen did. But he has time to adjust yet, and would do well to watch the wary Azhar Ali go about his work at No3. Ali may be a callow Test player, but he has spent four seasons playing club cricket in Scotland, and knows how to bat in the most miserable of English conditions. Pakistan also look a better batting side for the introduction of Shoaib Malik as a replacement for Shahid Afridi, though they should surely consider moving Malik up the order. Another key will be whether Salman Butt can shoulder the burden of leading the side and maintain his fine form with the bat.
This series should be utterly absorbing to watch. Once it starts, all the thoughts of what follows on its heels should be forgotten for a month at least. There will be enough to hold the attention happening on the pitch, for players, pundits and spectators alike. If England fail to focus on the here and now of the next match then they may find that, once this series ends, that sing-song confidence is not be quite so voluble.
Mars attacks
"We were sitting at the boundary edge when all of a sudden, out of a blue sky, we saw this small dark object hurtling towards us."
Given that they were sat just square of cow corner watching Luke Wright bat in a Twenty20 match, Sussex fans Jan Marszal and Richard Haynes could have been forgiven for thinking it was the ball that was coming their way. But then "it landed five yards inside the boundary and split into two pieces. One piece bounced up and hit me in the chest and the other ended up against the boundary board."
"It" was a meteorite, believed to be 4.5 billion years old and the first to land in the UK since 1992, or so the experts say. Coincidence? The Spin suspects it is time to start picking the World XI to play Mars ...
This is an extract taken from The Spin, guardian.co.uk's weekly cricket email. You can sign up here.
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