Cricket: Dick Turpin and Ned Kelly in one

Andrew Flintoff (right) does not like being compared with Ian Botham, but it's inevitable. Picture / Reuters

Had it been Andrew Flintoff rather than Steve Harmison delivering the decisive ball on the sunlit, unforgettable high noon of English cricket, we would have been engulfed by a last flight of fantasy.

Instead, we just had to settle for a jewel of reality, a victory over Australia that could hardly have had a finer margin ... or greater significance.

The second test won by England at Edgbaston by a mere two runs was epic in almost every possible way and so whatever else the big man from Lancashire achieves in his explosive career it is hard to believe that he will surpass the influence he exerted in one of the most important English triumphs in the history of the Ashes.

Australia's captain, Ricky Ponting, framed Flintoff's effort quite perfectly. "It was stand-and-deliver cricket from start to finish," he said, and what did that make Flintoff?

It made him Dick Turpin and Ned Kelly rolled into one. As a batsman he was herculean. As a bowler he was awash with adrenalin and bad intentions. Indeed, he was so good, so overpowering in both his talent and his will, he took away any fear in applying the B-word burden that has bedevilled every aspiring English all-rounder through all the barren years.

Yes, of all the splendid things he was over three days and slightly less than two hours of play that did nothing less than define the often savage beauty and intrigue of test cricket, Flintoff was Bothamesque in the scale of his effect.

Even now, with the milestone of a truly great performance gloriously passed, Flintoff is unlikely to warm to the comparison. He is on the record saying that his ambition is to be the first Flintoff, not the second Botham, but sometimes sporting history leaps out from the mothballs to make an unanswerable point.

Flintoff has the supreme gift of a Botham and all the great all-rounders.

He can shape the mood and the outline of cricket's ultimate investigator of the highest talent, the test match, and that he did it to this extraordinary one to such a degree means that he has set himself a standard of quite awesome proportions.

In the first innings he galvanised England with outrageous sixes in his 68, in the second he added with Simon Jones the 50 runs that stacked the odds hugely against the Australians, and then, when those odds were met with great control and confidence, ripped them apart.

The deliveries that swept away Justin Langer and Ponting were the kind of shattering blows that in a heavyweight title fight announce that one man is heading inexorably to victory.

Another dramatic measuring of his impact here: only one member of the world champion Australian team was a serious rival for man of one of the greatest test matches of all time. That was the working legend Shane Warne, who with Brett Lee and Michael Kasprowicz took Australia so agonisingly close to what would have been the most staggering Ashes recovery since Botham and Bob Willis struck back at Headingley in 1981.

Warne produced fiendish deliveries as he attempted to fill some of the void left by Glenn McGrath's mishap in the warm-up to the start of the test. He was the supreme example of Australia's defiance of defeat and, as at Lord's in the first test, he exerted a mesmerising power over key England batsmen.

But not Flintoff. He was untameable. He was on his own, a wild and untrammelled spirit that was accompanied by the power to execute with deadly precision.

Yesterday, Flintoff admitted that the meaning of the defeat, and the nature of it, at Lord's had bitten into him deeply. He went home in a mood of the sharpest reflection and self-examination. If England had any chance of the Ashes, it had to come from the willingness of the players to look at their own performances.

The results of such scourging were luminous here. This was an England team which refused to collapse, which was ready to fight to the last wicket, the last shot, and Ponting was generous in his reaction. "It was a test match in every sense of the term," said the Australian captain, "and England deserve praise for the effort. We got close, but not close enough."

What he didn't say - but you could read it easily enough in his eyes and the body language of his players - was that few Australian teams will have carried quite the motivational baggage that will be taken to Old Trafford for the third test on Thursday.

The English victory may have been by two runs, but in the end that was an insignificant detail.

Nodding soberly, England captain Michael Vaughan agreed that there would probably have been no coming back from a second straight defeat, and especially in what would have been such demoralising circumstances.

Winning, however it was finally achieved, was the difference between belief and a sad resignation that perhaps the other team were simply too strong in talent and conviction.

Now England believe. You could see some of that in the ferocious hugging of Harmison when the final Australian wicket fell. It was more than mere celebration of a great victory. It was a release from sport's most demoralising fear, the one that says whatever you do you will not find a way to win.

At Old Trafford, the Australians will no doubt produce everything they have to reimpose such pessimism. But for once they will not carry the old guarantees.

The problem is that England do now truly believe - in themselves, and, most of all, in Andrew Flintoff.

- INDEPENDENT