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Certainty is in short supply in Australian cricket after captain Ricky Ponting was unable to name his team for the second Ashes Test at Adelaide Oval.
Instead, Ponting and the national selectors have chosen to wait until Friday morning to decide on the composition of their bowling attack, having made the early call to remove the misfiring Mitchell Johnson from the team.
Doug Bollinger and Ryan Harris appear likely to be chosen in place of Johnson and Ben Hilfenhaus, though Harris did little to ease suspicions about the soundness of his knee by not bowling on match eve.
By contrast Bollinger charged in once again, and will bring welcome aggression and direction to an attack sorely lacking in both on the final two days at Brisbane.
Ponting said Bollinger and Harris were on course, and explained the latter’s absence was to do with having just bowled in two innings of a Sheffield Shield match.
“They’re all in pretty good touch. If you look at Bollinger and Harris, what they’ve done in state cricket in the past few weeks has been pretty impressive,” said Ponting.
“I faced Dougy this morning and he was good, Ryan didn’t bowl today but he was pretty much on the mark yesterday … he’s obviously ready to go as well.
“Coming out of the game that he just played the other day (in Melbourne), and that he’d had a good bowl yesterday, we didn’t expect our bowlers to bowl every day leading into the game.
“If we had any worries about him and his knee he wouldn’t be in our squad.”
Harris, a former South Australian paceman before moving to Queensland, is attuned to conditions at Adelaide Oval.
Ben Hilfenhaus did not bowl to his optimum level in Brisbane but was an effective operator on unresponsive pitches during the recent tour of India, where he might have finished with many more wickets with an ounce of good fortune.
“Hilfy’s strengths are his ability to swing the new ball, he’s a very consistent bowler who bowls in good areas and is able to tie batters down,” said Ponting.
“Ryan’s strengths are that he’s grown up playing all his cricket here, he’s probably slightly quicker through the air and hits the wicket a little bit harder than Ben does, and probably is a better reverse-swing bowler for later in the game.
“Ben did a terrific job for us in India in conditions that will probably be fairly similar to what the wicket will be like here, for the last couple of days in particular – he was probably our stand-out bowler there.
“If you put all those things together it makes that decision a pretty difficult one, which is why we need a fair bit of time to think about it.”
By contrast England are expected to go into the match unchanged, and their captain Andrew Strauss observed that instability is never useful.
“My experience, in playing international cricket, is that lack of stability is not a good thing – when you’re not sure what your best 11 is,” said Strauss.
“That means people are generally a bit concerned about their place in the side.
“In that sense, that’s a good thing for us.
“But I think we’ve got to be just slightly wary of the guys they’ve got in their squad at the moment.
“It’s not like they’re dragging someone from obscurity, and we’ve got to be good enough to contend with them.”
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