It's one of cricket's old saws – add two wickets to a healthy-looking total and it doesn't look so good. And it's one of English cricket's oldsores – they keep doing it to prove the adage.

Today the match was wrenched out of England's grasp by not one but three double-wicket bursts. Mark Butcher and Marcus Trescothick, so reassuring yesterday, both perished early on, in the same Glenn McGrath over. McGrath, who hadn't looked at his best, suddenly found himself with the top three wickets as the slip cordon was kept busy and 170 for 1 turned into 171 for 3.

That was the most important double, as one of the overnight pair really had to go on to the sort of big hundred that Matthew Hayden had made if England were seriously going to threaten Australia's score. In the end, even though England's top five all made encouraging starts, the total only just exceeded the aggregate of Hayden and Ricky Ponting by a leg-bye or two.

The dreaded doubles doubled. Nasser Hussain got a jaffa from Jason Gillespie after a feisty innings, then Alec Stewart unluckily dragged one on – and, swimming along at 268 for 3, England got that sinking feeling at 270 for 5.

And finally, after Craig White took our advice to let McGrath's deliveries go rather too literally, Andy Bichel nipped in with the wickets of Ashley Giles and Andy Caddick in three balls. So 308 for 6 was suddenly 308 for 8, with one man missing.

There were some welcome signs of defiance when Australia batted again. Caddick motored in more aggressively, and upped a gear to remove Ponting with a snorter after feeding Justin Langer's off-stump fallibility. Hussain attacked spunkily, packing the slips. At one point he had an 8-1 off-side field, whereupon Caddick contrarily decided to bowl around the wicket. But England won't fancy chasing many more than 300 in the final innings, and with Damien Martyn more at home, and Hayden looking about as unbowlable as Bill Woodfull in the 1930s, the Aussies are almost that far ahead already.

All this meant that it wasn't just Queensland's farmers who were looking skywards praying for rain. The sort of apocalyptic downpour that saved England at Brisbane in 1998-99 is needed again, if Australia aren't to start the series with a not-so-humane killing at the place the locals like to call the Gabbatoir.

Steven Lynch is editor of Wisden.com.

© Wisden CricInfo Ltd