Contrasting batting styles combine to form a special magic

England's sixth-wicket stand of 170 in 140 minutes between Andrew "Freddie" Flintoff and Geraint Jones provided a scintillating contrast of styles that is compounded by the great difference between their physical appearances.

England's sixth-wicket stand of 170 in 140 minutes between Andrew "Freddie" Flintoff and Geraint Jones provided a scintillating contrast of styles that is compounded by the great difference between their physical appearances.

Jones, slim and much shorter than Flintoff, used his bat like the most skilful of fencers as he produced a succession of wonderful strokes with a classical, almost clinical precision.

On the other hand, Flintoff is a giant of a man and when he picks up his bat there is just an element of primitive man wielding his club. This, of course, infects everything that he does with a wonderful aura of anticipation and excitement. His power is colossal and while watching him bat it is almost possible to feel vibrations of this power.

On the two or three occasions after lunch when Ramnaresh Sarwan served up gentle long hops to Flintoff, the process of execution was marvellous to watch and so gloriously predictable. The back leg would go across to the off side, the left leg would move a fraction to leg and the bat, which, although not the heaviest in the business, was picked up as if it was piece of matchwood. Then, as it started on its downward swing, it reminded one of nothing more than the axe in an executioner's hand.

It was left to the paying customers to try to guess how many rows back into the stand the ball would land - that was the only element of uncertainty.

Flintoff provided batting pyrotechnics of the highest class. When the ball was overpitched he thumped his left leg down the pitch and drove through the covers; when the ball was short outside the off stump he lay back and cracked it square.

But, and this is so important in the ongoing development of Flintoff, he never relinquished control until Omari Banks came back on to bowl the most amiable off breaks just before the end and was brutally dispatched for three sixes in an over. Flintoff only hit the bad balls to the boundary and there was not, until this one over from Banks, any indiscriminate slogging. When he pulled Sarwan for those ferocious sixes he would push the next out defensively on the off side. It was disciplined batting.

He has now passed fifty in each of his last six Test matches and the only other man to have done this batting at No 6 was a chap called Garry Sobers. Although this innings was a sophisticated form of murder, one could not help wondering if the sequence of consistency would continue against South Africa this winter, to say nothing of Australia next year. In both these two series the opposition's bowling will be a vastly different affair.

Back to the contrast: while Flintoff could not help but give the impression, erroneous though it was, of using the bludgeon rather than the rapier, the delicacy of Jones's strokeplay provided the difference between elegant and classical copperplate handwriting and a good robust, cheerful and highly legible free-range scrawl. It was not a day when the competition was acute, but it was a day of magical striking of a cricket ball.