THE FIRST BALL OF AN ASHES SERIES IS AN ATLAS-LIKE BURDEN OF RESPONSIBILITY

It holds remarkable on-screen presence for little more than a stage direction in the grand five-week play

It is a gladiatorial moment; the rising fervour of the crowd, the batsman’s final seconds of preparation, the exaggerated pause as the bowler turns at his mark.

There are few occasions in sport that boast the same high drama without a flicker of action  - the silence before the starter’s gun in an Olympic 100m final, perhaps. The weigh-in before a super-fight?

One or two, but that’s it.

The first ball of an Ashes series holds remarkable on-screen presence for what is little more than a stage direction in the grand old, five-week play.

The first ball of an Ashes series means more. It commands respect. It tells the viewer to wait to put the kettle on.

The first ball of an Ashes series can come to define the rest of the story.

Just take the case of Steve Harmison.

In the space of two years in the mid-2000s, Harmison - the introverted Durham native who led England’s attack through good times and bad, both professionally and privately - lived both extremes.

Twice he bowled the first delivery of an Ashes series, to two vastly different results.

The first - a rising, snorting delivery up the slope at Lord’s in 2005 - came mighty close to leaving Justin Langer in need of a good nose doctor.

 

The second, to the same batsman at Brisbane 16 months later, is among the most comically memorable moments in Ashes history - a wide that could have been a wide twice over, taken almost apologetically by Andrew Flintoff in the slip cordon.

Both were precursors of what was to come.

In 2005, Harmison’s relentless, unrepentant assault of the Australian top order stoked England’s fires. He struck Langer on the arm with his second delivery on that Marylebone morning and later bloodied Ricky Ponting with another A-grade howitzer. Matthew Hayden also wore one for good measure.

These were some of the world’s finest batsmen - not just at that moment but of a generation - struggling to deal with the lolloping Harmison’s ferocious pace and bounce.

Langer would later compare that session to ‘playing the first half of a rugby match’.

In his BBC column, the Australian opener wrote: ‘By lunch our camp looked more like an emergency room than a cricket changing room.

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‘With bodies and egos bruised and cut to shreds, we had to face more of the same fire after lunch.

‘Harmison was more like Jonah Lomu as he ran through our batting with the aggression and radar of a world-class bowler’.

Harmison, the mild-mannered and retiring lad from the north east, had made mincemeat out of Baggy Green.

His opening delivery and the spell that followed set the tone for the rest of the series - a compelling slug-fest between two heavyweights that ended, so famously, in England victory.

In Brisbane the following winter, the rematch could not have gone any worse.

Harmison was never comfortable on his travels - he was a homebody who suffered from depression and hid it from the world - and given the task of making a statement in front of 80,000 at The Gabba, and a whole heap more back home, he ‘froze’ (his own words).

Flintoff cradled the ball at second slip, umpire Steve Bucknor stretched his arms out wide and, as the crowd began to laugh, Harmison’s face - a curious contortion of smirk and sadness - gave his inner emotions away.

 

By the end of the over he had been chopped to the boundary twice by Langer.

‘I let the enormity of the occasion get to me. My whole body was nervous,’ Harmison said afterwards.

‘I could not get my hands to stop sweating. The first ball slipped out of my hands, the second did as well and, after that, I had no rhythm, nothing.’

The delivery was the perfect analogy for England’s pathetic defence of the Ashes that winter, their challenge tossed aside by the Australians with utter disdain.

Again, the opening remarks framed the whole debate.

English shoulders dropped when Harmison picked out Flintoff’s paws in 2006, just as their spirits had risen when he beat up Langer and Co little more than a year previously.

The examples go beyond one man, as well.

In 1994, Michael Slater chopped Phil DeFreitas to the point fence off the first ball of the first session of the first Test of the summer and England never recovered.

‘When I prepared that morning I had an end in mind,’ DeFreitas later told The Telegraph.

‘But as we walked out, Gatt (Mike Gatting) said to (Mike) Atherton that I should bowl from the other end because the wind had changed.

‘My length was short and wide and Slater cut me over slips and gully for two fours. That got them going.’

Whoever gets thrown the ball just before 11am local time on Thursday, November 23 will know all too well the Atlas-like responsibility on his shoulders.

How he’ll carry the burden, no one knows.

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