The Sir Leonard Hutton Gates have become a source of unwanted controversy for the worthies of the Yorkshire County Cricket Club, though the incongruity of the great man amid sari-clad groupies obscures an omission from their design little less vexing. There's not a single identifiable Australian.

Hutton esteemed Australians. "They have the utmost ability for producing that little extra, or instilling into the opposition an inferiority complex that can have and has had a crushing effect. Australians have no inhibitions."

As then, so yesterday, with intimidatory Australian excellence stifling a few moments of English promise, and not without cause. Teams that score at 4.5 an over for 100 overs deserve to win Tests; teams allowing opponents to do so do not.

Damien Martyn's batting on this tour has been an essay in understatement, and his 100 yesterday contained few flourishes and fewer histrionics. To say that he is a textbook batsman is not to flatter him; it is to flatter the textbook.

Martyn's signature is the back-foot cover drive, and yesterday he provided a masterclass in this stroke, meeting the ball at the top of the bounce and repeatedly perforating point and cover.

There was a brief period of calm in mid-morning, where four runs accrued in five overs, not least because of Alan Mullally's persistence in what would have been the ideal line to a left-hander while unfortunately bowling to a right-hander.

But the second new ball, which should have been an instrument of English aggression, became an avenue to Australian reassertion: the first 14 deliveries with it yielded half a dozen boundaries, all of withering force.

As at Birmingham, Martyn went to a break on the brink of a hundred: 99 at tea on the third day at Edgbaston, he was 97 at lunch yesterday. One more back-foot drive sufficed, capped with a celebratory on-drive. He only got out when he attempted something outside the orthodox, drawing away to slog with the last man present.

On a pitch from which England's bowlers had obtained sometimes surprising lift; the lift that Glenn McGrath obtained was thus altogether unsurprising.

Michael Atherton was in the obdurate mood he often brings to press conferences while Marcus Trescothick made his usual good impression, but McGrath eclipsed them both in the 20 minutes after tea.

The surprise was that Shane Warne bowled as little as he did; indeed he has barely featured in the match so far, though a bowler only five wickets away from 400 in Tests is surely craving his captain's ear.