Day 2 Wrap: Dramatic twists have Test on knife edge

Australia’s failed Ashes campaign of this year had not even played out its final act before an assessment of where it had derailed was aired in public.

The beseeching from England captain Alastair Cook for Test pitches that more closely replicated “English conditions” had been heeded by those in charge of grass and weather at Birmingham and Nottingham, where the Australians duly plummeted to hefty defeats.

And handed over the urn with indecent haste, having been bowled out for 136 and then 60 in consecutive first innings.

'We didn’t adapt to the conditions' was the refrain from those asked to explain the sudden reversal in dominance from Australia’s thumping win in the second Test on the sort of flat pitch more usually associated with Lahore than Lord’s.

Quick single: Lyon survives controversial review

'We need to play the ball later – under our eyes, and with soft hands’ came the chorus from the top six specialist batters who averaged 77 per wicket in when playing in London and just 22 in those alien conditions beyond the capital.

And so they returned home, to the comfort of their own beds, flat pitches and cloudless skies and those carefully articulated responses were packed away with the long-sleeved jumpers and passports that become surplus to requirements during a home summer.

Watch: Australia collapse early on day two

But the arrival of the pink ball has dictated that conditions at the Adelaide Oval, long considered the most batsman-friendly of Australia’s Test venues, have been reconfigured to ensure the wear and tear on cricket’s newest star was rather more buff and polish.

Not only did the 11 millimetres of grass (around 8mm more than a typical Adelaide Test track) left on the pitch provide a cushion that carried the pink ball through the 65 and 72 overs needed for the respective first innings in the third Test of this Trans-Tasman Commonwealth Bank Series.

It also created the closest to "English conditions" that a Mediterranean climate is likely to host, especially in an El Nino summer.

Which, given the lessons endured in the United Kingdom four months earlier along with the Black Caps’ first innings of 202 which was their lowest at Adelaide Oval, gave the Australian batters both warning and opportunity to parade those new skills of which they repeatedly spoke.

Quick single: Nifty Nevill proves a quiet achiever

Adapting to the conditions, which were vastly changed from those served up in the opening two Tests of the season in Brisbane and Perth where bat not so much dominated ball as made it an incidental participant.

Playing the ball late, and 'under their eyes' rather than reaching to make contact when the risk of deviation was most extreme and the chance of edging a catch behind the wicket heightened.

And doing so with 'soft hands', to ensure that if the ball did catch the edge it did not meet the same fate in the slips.

Which is what David Warner didn’t do in the fourth over of Australia’s historic batting stint under lights last night when he aimed an airy cover drive at a ball from Trent Boult that curled away and found enough of the hefty edges on the opener’s bat to land in the lap of third slip.

In the cool light of the following day, those words from the Ashes were still refusing to resonate across the hemispheres.

Watch: Australia lose 6-62

While the ball that ultimately dismissed Adam Voges two and a half overs into the second afternoon offered him few options – a yorker-length outswinger that he squeezed from its line on the stumps to third slip – the chance he produced two balls earlier was discretionary.

When Voges flashed at Tim Southee’s wider outswinger and edged at head height through a gap in the cordon to give the Black Caps bowlers a sense of something about to happen.

As another who feels most comfortable when he can feel ball on bat, preferably with brutal force, Mitchell Marsh displayed the watchfulness and restraint that had proved so elusive in England for almost half an hour, during which time he managed just three scoring shots and four runs.

But then he pushed hard at a delivery that he would, in retrospect, concede he could have let go but instead edged through to the ‘keeper for his sixth single-figure score in his past seven Test innings.

And in a poignantly tragic contrast, his older brother who suffered most harshly from the traumas of Edgbaston and Trent Bridge when he was recalled to bolster the batting in the latter and then sacked from the next Test after he nicked off to the swinging ball for scores of 0 and 2, completed the top-order collapse.

Batting in conditions that might well have induced nightmarish flashbacks, Marsh the elder had equalled that prior match aggregate when he seemed so delighted to have unambiguously found the middle of his bat with an off-drive that he instinctively took off for a run.

Several changes of intent later, he was departing the scene as the day’s second-most most conspicuous victim of a palpably poor decision.

Watch: Marsh's horror run-out

There were two Australia batters who practised what they had all been preaching during the Ashes, and their names can easily be found with a cursory examination of today’s scorecard.

Apart from a pair of free-hitting tailenders, Steve Smith and Peter Nevill were the only players among Australia’s specialist batters to reach 15 and both went on to score considerably more.

Smith successfully quelled his naturally positive approach to fashion a circumspect, skipper-like 53 from 114 balls during which he left assiduously and minimised risk until his dismissal.

Which came as he tried to dismiss struggling off-spinner Mark Craig down the ground with a lusty swing born from hours of restraint.

Nevill’s innings-high 66 from only four balls fewer than his captain faced was a knock played in two distinctly divergent parts.

Watch: Nifty Nevill's needful knock

The first was clever and controlled, as shown from his opening scoring stroke just a few balls after Mitchell Marsh was dismissed when he ran a delivery ball from Doug Bracewell through the slips to the boundary, albeit without fear.

His willingness to 'play under his eyes' and with 'soft hands' to allow the ball on to his bat rather than try and confront it earlier in its transit showed that the key to playing in English conditions had not been misplaced somewhere in the UK.

Then, when the sun shone brightest, the ball was at its oldest and softest and he was the last recognised batter still going he chanced his eye and his arm.

And took Australia into the ascendancy in the process.

The solace for those Australia batsmen who fell in such hauntingly and recently familiar fashion is that the Black Caps – who were England’s opponents in two Tests that immediately preceded the Ashes this year – had similarly forgotten or ignored the batting wisdom peddled by the Australians.

The dismissals of NZ openers Martin Guptill and Tom Latham by the time the Black Caps’ lead had reached double figures – both driving hard at balls swinging away from the bat and edging catches to the cordon – gave credence to an even more deep-rooted sporting truism.

That old habits invariably die hard.