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There's a pernicious and enduring fallacy about girls and throwing - namely, that they can't do it.

As sporting falsehoods go, it's right up there alongside "Australia always win at Lord's" and - and we all know what and Dick Fosbury had to say on those topics.

If it's been a while since you last threw a javelin, I can assure you from harsh recent experience that it's significantly harder than it looks. An event that appears to be a simple matter of running, turning sideways and lobbing as hard as you can turns out to be more technically complicated than the pole vault and rougher on the upper body than shot put and discus combined.

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Watching top sportsmen in action is usually hugely impressive, but it can also give you a dangerously deluded notion of how easy it is to do what they've just pulled off.

Many is the club cricketer who has worn a ball on the chops after having a pop at a KP switch-hit in the nets, while anyone who's ever attempted a from atop a high board will have a particularly keen appreciation of just how solid a liquid like water can feel.

It's something I have time to muse on as I watch Welsh decathlete David Guest ping his 16lb shot put effortlessly into the distance, just before mine flops out of my hand and narrowly misses crushing my toes.

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You'd describe it as a remake of the , except in the original the plucky Englishmen don't get away with it.

Quite how England dug their way out of Stalag Ponting will have their Australian prison guards scratching their heads for years to come.

They were goners, finished, handcuffed to the wall and waiting for the firing squad to put them out of their misery.

At 12.20pm, they were 70-5, still 169 runs in arrears with the weather set fair and 70 overs left in the day. With three hours and 40 overs to go, they were 159-7. Then they were nine down, still behind and with 69 balls to survive.

It shouldn't make sense. It shouldn't have happened. A lot of people still can't believe it did.

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I sense there's some excitement out there about England's performance in Cardiff. And a whole heap of talk about Australia's. What an incredible match.

You might well disagree with the numbers I've dished out, but that's the point. Get stuck in and knock yourself out. I still can't believe what I've just seen...

ENGLAND

Andrew Strauss - 4
Got a start in the first innings before being foxed by Johnson's slingy bouncer and gloving to slip, but didn't even get that in the second. So disappointed with the top-edged cut off Hauritz that cost him his wicket in the second that he remained rooted to the spot for several seconds. Lacked inspiration and imagination in the field as his bowlers toiled.

Alastair Cook - 3
Two poor shots, two cheap dismissals. His bat was well away from his body on the first day, his front foot planted on the fourth. Technical problems to resolve.

Ravi Bopara - 4
Never looked comfortable even when scoring quickly on the first morning. Could have been out to Johnson's slower one before exactly the same delivery did for him again. Unlucky to be given out lbw by Billy Doctrove on Saturday - the ball was going over the top of the stumps, and Doctrove had turned down plumb shouts until that point - but was playing round his front pad.

Kevin Pietersen - 6
England's most fluent batsman on Wednesday, but the manner of his dismissal will anger traditionalists for years. Horrible misjudgement against Hilfenhaus as England fell apart, leaving alone a straight ball that lacked any real danger. Not the performance he wanted on the biggest stage of all.

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You know you're in trouble when the sight of heavy rain falling from a grey sky is the most uplifting thing that's happened all day.

How quickly England's pre-series optimism has been washed away. Was it only four days ago that people were talking about the damage their spinners were going to wreak on the Australian batting, how the tourists' unheralded bowling attack was going to struggle in English conditions?

We are only on the first chapter of these Ashes, but the dominant plot is already clear. For England supporters it's also a horribly familiar one: Australia dominating, England in full retreat.

It's difficult to decide what was the most depressing element for the home fans on .

There's the , of course - 219 runs behind with eight wickets left, and the forecast for Sunday set fair; Australia running up their fourth highest total ever against England, and their biggest for 63 years; four Australian batsmen scoring centuries in the same innings of an Ashes Test for the first time in history.

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A few years back, Sheffield United manager .

His reasoning was simple, if characteristically unhinged: his team always started the season in dreadful form before suddenly going on a brilliant run as soon as Santa Claus had been and gone. By throwing the party pre-season, he hoped to trigger that fine form from the very start.

Andrew Strauss might want to try something similar. For a second successive day, England wrestled the initiative back from Australia in an outstanding morning session before letting it slip away completely in a sobering afternoon of toil and trouble.

Cornflakes for lunch, fry-ups for tea, cuppas during the drinks interval. Anything to get his players thinking that it's still morning.

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The box that rocks

There are plenty of hospitality boxes at this redeveloped ground, all of them full with happy hordes of guzzlers, but one is proving significantly more popular with the snoopers and binocular-users than any of the others.

The match sponsor's one is passed over, the England team sponsor's likewise - for just beyond both lies the seat of the Australian Wags.

Michael Clarke's model girlfriend has been in town to watch her man make afternoon Ashes hay, and so too has Mitchell Johnson's ladyfriend .

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You can make statistics tell you almost anything, but some stand up and speak for themselves.

has played in six Ashes series before this one. In half of them he'd scored a century in his first innings of the series. No-one can say they weren't warned.

A day that had begun with such brio for England ended with hanging over the home crowd. 56 overs and four hours without a wicket, 189 runs stolen and slapped in an unbroken stand, Ponting trotting off supremely satisfied on 100 not out.

The pairing of Ponting and Katich squashed the life out of England as slowly and surely as a steamroller. The match remains alive - the lead is still 186 runs - but so too does the partnership.

At no point did either man cut loose. Australia's 200 came up off 348 deliveries. But it's not that sort of pitch, and it wasn't that sort of occasion.

Ponting's 38th Test ton was a chanceless knock. En route to it, he passed 11,000 Test runs, should that count in your scorebook. It sometimes feels like 10,000 of them have come against England.

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Ashes heroes take a bow

While today's players tucked into isotonic beverages and carbo-bars at tea, tributes were being paid to heroes of previous Ashes battles on the Cardiff outfield.

The occasion? The induction of Tom Graveney, Peter May and Ian Chappell into the ICC's Cricket Hall of Fame.

Graveney and Chappell were there to doff their commemorative caps to all corners, May's widow Virginia to receive his. And if any of the three players had been at their playing peak, they'd have been absolute certs for selection this time around.

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We thought it would be close, and we weren't wrong.

If an Ashes series is a heavyweight title fight, this was a cagey opening round that saw both fighters land big blows before retiring behind their watchful jabs. And if at the close some judges had Australia marginally ahead on points, this is a ding-dong that is yet to see its decisive moment.

England would have wanted better than after winning the toss. Equally they would have settled for the same after being 90-3 with seemingly on the rampage.

It was that sort of day. Just when one side looked to have forced the other close to the ropes, the opposition would slip away and come back counter-punching.

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Hard work and happiness for Hauritz

If there's larger shoes to fill than Shane Warne's, they must belong to Bigfoot.

For Nathan Hauritz, - two wickets for 260 in his two matches on tour so far - the job is an unenviable one. Picked on the morning of the match ahead of Stuart Clark to give Ricky Ponting a spinning option, his long afternoon in the Cardiff sun looked like being one big on hard work and small of turn.

From the start Ponting seemed to be determined to use him as a defensive option, despite Australia coming out after lunch with England wobbling badly at 90-3. His first field included a long on, deep midwicket and backward square leg, allowing the England pair of KP and Colly to ease the tension with strolled singles all over the park.

There was little thought of attacking, no sign of the sort of flight and variation that might have pulled the batsmen out of their comfort zone.

In some ways that's to be expected - after his flayings at Hove and Worcester, Hauritz is clearly aware that he could be the weakest link in this Aussie attack - but the monotony gave England the breathing space they had been denied by Mitchell Johnson and Ben Hilfenhaus before lunch.

Warne famously accused Monty Panesar of playing the same Test match 30 times. Early in Cardiff his successor seemed happy to produce the same ball 100 times.

Hauritz tends to get his wickets from drift away from the right-handers, rather than big turn. When he did choose to gamble, giving one some air, Pietersen was tempted into a dance down the pitch that nearly saw him beaten.

0-41 off 14 overs reads better than 2-260. 1-42 reads even better. Pietersen's sweep after tea was injudicious in the extreme, but the way that Hauritz celebrated told you that he didn't care.

A wicket from nowhere is always a joy. When it's the scalp of the opposition's best batsman, it feels even better.

Sedate scenes during early skirmishes

Nerves can do strange things to people. They turn some into screaming lunatics, others into hand-wringing mutes. So far at Cardiff on Wednesday there is a whole heap more of the latter than the former.

Such has been the build-up to this series that we almost assumed it would be as raucous as the last Test between the two teams on these shores, the flag-waving frenzy at The Oval 22 months ago.

That might still happen, depending on what happens to the partnership between Kevin Pietersen and Paul Collingwood, and how long it takes for the early afternoon beverages to fizz their way into bloodstreams - but a combination of Mitchell Johnson's wickets and an attritional afternoon are keeping the atmosphere on a tight leash.

There have been just a couple of trumpet tootles from the Barmy Army's horn section, plus an early chorus of God Save The Queen when Ravi Bopara drove Johnson for a classical four.

The Fanatics, three rows deep in the Cathedral Road stand, are making less noise than their Hewitt-cheering compatriots at Wimbledon last week.

The opening day four years ago was an action movie from start to finish - Australia on the ropes, the Lord's crowd ecstatic, England then rocked back to the delight of the cavorting tourists.

This time around it's a slow-burner rather than page-turner - although that could soon change. Representatives of the match sponsor have been handing out fake bank notes called Gatts, to be exchanged for a drink at a reception hosted by the former England captain.

One Gatt = one drink. And if there isn't some sort of all-you-can-eat buffet there too, you can bet that the host might have something to say about it.

Cricket the Welsh way

Since this is the first ever Test match in Wales, it seems only fitting that visitors from across the Severn - and the other side of the world - celebrate that fact by going a little native.

I'll assume that little assistance is needed in the guzzling of Brains, and that if those over the age of 50 wish to grow moustaches they can do it in their sleep.

Language, however, can be a tougher test - so with thanks to Cowbridge Comprehensive alumni Tom Williams and Dogger (don't ask - I can't explain) here are a few key words and phrases to roll your tongue around over the next five days.

Four - pedwar

Six - chwech

Opener - agorwr

Slow wicket - wiced araf

Reverse swing - swing newid

Spinner - troellwr

Rabbit - cwningen

How some might describe KP - chwaraewr senglau

And an easy one for slow learners: stadium - stadiwm

I realise there's not much steer on pronunciation. I'll open the floor to others to provide that - and feel free to dive in with other suggestions of your own.

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Forget the waiting - it's over. The ground's been built, the pitch unveiled, the players practised on the outfield.

? Check. Blazered captains posed with the urn? Yup. The favourite old Ashes clips - Willis flapping in at Headingley, Warne bamboozling Gatt, Bradman laying elegant waste - all have been exhumed and enjoyed afresh.

That much we know. What no-one can predict with any confidence is what will happen out in the middle over the next 47 days.

It can't be as close as it was four years ago. It can't be as one-sided as it was two years ago. Beyond that, we're all left guessing and finger-crossing.

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Oh, the tedium of being injured. And oh, the terrifying speed with which the weeks are slipping by before the one-hour decathlon...

Time for a few numbers. Seven weeks to go until the big day, nine events to learn properly (God bless you, ), four weeks out so far with the hamstring injury. It doesn't add up to a whole heap of happiness.

The good news? The hamstring is slowly mending, helped by dogged adherence to a labyrinthine series of drills called PATS and a load of strengthening exercise that have more than a hint of stable doors and departing horses about them.

At the weekend I ran for the first time in almost a month. The bad news? That run lasted 10 minutes. It was done at a pace that enabled an old lady out walking her daschund to accelerate past me like .

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