Rude awakening for Australia after first test dropped

By Ian Ransom

MELBOURNE (Reuters) - Australians headed to bed on Sunday with a warm familiar feeling -- the comfort of seeing their cricket team with a foot placed firmly on England's throat -- but woke up to little short of a nightmare on Monday.

News that England had somehow snatched a draw from the jaws of certain defeat on the final day of the first Ashes test made the morning cornflakes and toast a bit harder to digest in the sports-mad country.

Never mind the heroics of England's Paul Collingwood, who stubbornly batted for six hours as the rest of his team mates sold their wickets on the cheap.

Or the cool-headedness of last wicket pair Monty Panesar and Jimmy Anderson who lasted a nervy final hour under withering pressure.

Such were mere frivolities in the search to apportion blame for a nail-biting draw that felt more like a whimpering defeat for much of the nation's media.

Australian captain Ricky Ponting found willing support in his attack on the English dressing room, for sending out a 12th man and a physiotherapist ostensibly to tell Panesar and Anderson the rather straightforward fact they had to bat out the final hour.

"To suggest (England captain Andrew Strauss') intentions were good after sending (them) onto the field to deliberately waste time in the dying minutes of the tensely drawn first test is ridiculous," one irate commentator in the Herald-Sun newspaper wrote on Monday.

Ponting, however, had his own detractors, and was flayed for throwing the ball with a handful of overs left to part-time spinner Marcus North, whose first innings success with the bat unfairly magnified his ineffectiveness with the ball.