Captain Sensible Holds the Key ; Strauss's Battle with Ponting Will Decide the Closest Series for Years, Sayashes Heroes [Scot Region]

Summary

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JUSTIN LANGER still winces at the memory, recalling an almost physical as well as emotional pain. Marcus Trescothick tries to suppress a smile but, four years on, still can't quite manage it. Both men, once the fiercest of Ashes combatants, now the tightest of Somerset county colleagues, recall the moment when the Ashes series of 2005 turned on a whim of fate, or, to be more precise, on the ankle of the great Australian paceman Glenn McGrath, no more than an hour before the second Test at Edgbaston.

Yet while it gives the former England opener infinitely more pleasure to discuss it, his Aussie counterpart's description of it is immeasurably more graphic, for it began the process that finished with a generation of world-beating Australian players discovering what it was like to lose the Ashes.

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Captain Sensible Holds the Key ; Strauss's Battle with Ponting Will Decide the Closest Series for Years, Sayashes Heroes [Scot Region]

'There is no doubt that moment changed the whole event,' says Langer. 'We'd won so easily in the first Test at Lord's -- even though the England bowlers had shaken us up on the first day and bowled us out for 190 -- and, though I hesitate to use the word complacent, it was like, "Here we go, we're going to beat England again, win the Ashes, bingo". Then Glenn steps on that ball.

'Did I see it? I'm standing three or four feet away and I'm looking over at him and I see the ball on the ground and his foot going down towards it and I just call out: "Noooooo". It was exactly like a slowmotion cartoon. McGrath goes down. Next thing...

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