Watson and Katich Battling To Put Australia Ahead

Australia's openers stood firm during a torrid 20.2-over session on the second morning at The Oval, employing luck and skill in equal measures to chisel their way to 61 for 0 in the first innings, having earlier dismissed England for a decent but insubstantial 332. Nevertheless, with England's seamers finding uneven bounce with the new ball, and Graeme Swann ripping the ball prodigiously out of the footholds, batting is unlikely to get any easier as the match wears on.

Watson, with three consecutive half-centuries to his name since his recall at Edgbaston, reached the interval on 30 not out, but he was by some distance the most fortunate of the two batsmen, as he survived three vociferous lbw appeals in the space of seven deliveries from James Anderson and Andrew Flintoff, who once again shared the new ball. If the first two were rightly adjudged to be zipping over the top, the third - from Flintoff - would have demolished leg stump, and given England their first breakthrough in the sixth over of the innings.

But Watson survived, and duly began to thrive. He clipped Flintoff's next delivery firmly through midwicket for four - the only boundary he conceded in a typically miserly six-over spell that went for seven runs - and had reached 17 from 42 balls when he dispatched Steve Harmison's first delivery with dismissive ease through backward square leg - a shot of such authority to a rank long-hop that Harmison's short leg fled from the scene after a solitary delivery.

At the other end, Katich danced and shimmied at the crease, particularly against Flintoff, for whom he kept altering his guard to cope with his differing lines from over and round the wicket. He climbed into a brace of leg-stump deliveries from Anderson to whip and clip him for two boundaries in an over, and had reached 26 not out before a rain-shower sent the players scurrying to the pavilion with a couple of minutes to go before the scheduled lunch break.

Earlier, Australia's seamers had required just 32 balls to claim the final two wickets of England's first innings, but not before Stuart Broad and Harmison had combined in a handy tenth-wicket partnership of 24. Broad was the last man to fall, caught at second slip by Ricky Ponting for a hard-hitting 37, a continuation of his impressive recent form with the bat. Two balls earlier, he had pulled Ben Hilfenhaus superbly through square leg for his first boundary of the morning, but Hilfenhaus responded with a full-length slower ball, to secure his third wicket of the innings.

Hilfenhaus's most notable dismissal, however, came from the ninth delivery of the day, when he curled a good-length delivery into Anderson's back pad, to send him on his way, lbw for 0, his first Test duck after six years and 54 Test innings. The end of Anderson's remarkable run left him fourth in the all-time list of duckless Test batsmen, behind Clive Lloyd, Aravinda de Silva and AB de Villiers, who holds the record with 78 fail-free innings in a row.

Harmison came to the crease averaging an incongruous 119 in Tests at The Oval, after a solitary dismissal in six previous innings, set about demonstrating that that was not entirely a fluke, with three further boundaries to hoist that mark to 131.