Gough unfazed by ferocity of Slater's assault

Ailing England paceman's characteristic persistence rewarded with vital wicket of Ponting after early mugging from Australian openers

Darren Gough suffered a violent mugging here in Birmingham last night and for a little while there was grave concern about his health. Psychological health, that is. He was repeatedly battered against the boundary fence of a cricket field and his attackers, who generally get their way, were confident that they had at least slowed him down for the early part of a critical summer.

Gough, being from Yorkshire and extremely awkward, naturally didn't see it that way and an hour or so after being so roughly handled he struck back at his persecutors in the way guaranteed to hurt them most.

He removed the crown jewellery of Australian batsmanship when he dismissed lbw the brilliant Ricky Ponting. As a matter of detail, Gough's delivery was actually a no- ball, but such a fact is not considered quite so vital these days. The important thing was Gough was still firing – and that all of England's weapons had not been spiked on the first day of a series which is supposed to be competitive.

For a little while the situation had been somewhat clouded by a drama hatched by Gough's opening bowling partner, Andrew Caddick. Remarkably Caddick had rescued somewhat another disastrous England batting performance before the Australians came to deliver an often sumptuous riposte.

Every time Caddick hit the ball to the boundary, and mocked the frailty of so much that had gone before, thousands of Englishmen expressed an emotion that was maybe just a little too complicated to be described as joy.

The result was a strange, keening sound – a little, frankly, like laughter in the graveyard. Bitter, ironic laughter, it had to be. Caddick's top score in Test cricket, an undefeated 49, and his sharing of the fourth-highest 10th-wicket stand – of 103 – in England's history with a typically belligerent Alec Stewart, might in different circumstances have been some blood-stirring call for wider resistance to an Australian supremacy which is seen in some quarters as absolute.

But there was no hiding place for England in the brave slog of Caddick. When Stewart was trapped lbw by an exasperated Glenn McGrath, England had benefited from a little cosmetic surgery, no more or no less. Even with the exotic largesse provided by Caddick's flailing bat, Nasser Hussain's team were still all out for a total of 294 on a pitch drained of juice and a bowler's hope. The wicket on which England had been sent in to bat, never of a violent disposition, would now have qualified for admission to a convent.

Michael Slater rather confirmed this by his reaction to Darren Gough's first over of an Ashes series in which the Yorkshireman is seen as one of the major reasons why Lord's didn't abandon all pretence and send the old urn direct to Sydney by air mail. Slater hit Gough for four fours in that first over. It was a psychological assault of the kind he administered to the more fragile England paceman Phil DeFreitas in Brisbane in the opening Test of the 94-95 series, and the impact was again so great it might have been delivered with a cudgel rather than a bat. Four times he punched Gough for square cuts of immense power. Four times he said that Australia were not about to surrender any initiatives on a day when they had made the right strategic decision in sending England to bat, and had squeezed out every advantage offered by the fast-drying pitch.

Only Mike Atherton (57) had shown any sustained resistance to the idea that Australia hold every important card this English summer, and when he left, caught brilliantly at second slip by Mark Waugh off Jason Gillespie, you could see the life drain out of the English batsmanship. Mark Butcher, called back from the wilderness, had offered some defiance and like everyone else in the ground was buoyed by the presence of Atherton, obdurate as ever and plainly relishing the idea of a summer of relentless conflict of spirit and talent with the best cricket team in the world. But when Atherton went, England were diminished to a point beyond, it seemed, retrieval even by the extraordinary vigour of the resistance of Stewart and Caddick.

England had applied a little make-up to the raddled face of their innings. They had 294 runs on the board, but if we had been talking about a wine glass, this one surely would have been deemed half empty rather than half full. It was an impression extravagantly developed by the assault of Slater. He always comes out in the fashion of a dog of war who has been kept on short rations, but the attack on Gough was remarkable even by the swaggering standards of Australian aggression.

Gough winced and blinked at the fury of the assault and from those moments the suspicion had to be that he would struggle to make the early impact on the Australian confidence that both he and Caddick craved. When the breakthrough came it was supplied by local hero Ashley Giles, aided by an extraordinary catch by Craig White to send back Matthew Hayden. But though Slater carried on his assault, Gough made a devastating strike when he removed Ponting, the man who has been considered most likely to dominate the series.

It meant that the Australians closed on 133 for 2, 161 runs behind England with eight wickets standing and with Slater, who can't make the Australian one-day team, on flood tide at 76 not out off 77 balls. It is, for all the defiance of Caddick with the bat and Gough with the ball, a menacing augury. Caddick slogged his way to prominence yesterday. Slater and Hayden accumulated their runs with a relentless pursuit of the bad ball, of which there were too many, and sometimes the good ones – and with mostly the same effect: a spreadeagled England fieldsman and the ball rattling against a fence.

The wickets of Slater and the Waughs, Damien Martyn and Adam Gilchrist are still to fall. The tendency is to weep for England.