An astounding inning from debutant Asthon Agar give Australia an upper edge on second day of first Ashes test  at Trent Bridge. Agar is a 19-year-old debutant; He is playing on 69 runs not out at lunch, he now holds the highest score by a No. 11 in Australian Test history.

He has shared in a transformational century stand for the last wicket with Phillip Hughes, a specialist batsman watching him in disbelief. 

Agar has even given Australia a first-innings lead and nobody, not the most one-eyed Australian alive, not his mother in her most doting mood imaginable, expected that.

Australia had been unable to contend with Anderson and Swann, two skilled practitioners in control of their game. At 117 for 9, still 98 runs behind, they were virtually out of the match. An unbroken last-wicket stand which by lunch was worth 112 from 128 balls has changed all that.

James Anderson was producing a contented exhibition of reverse-swing bowling. Graeme Swann was finding substantial turn. Australia lost five wickets for nine runs in 31 balls. 

But if England had imagined that a decisive advantage in the first Investec Test at Trent Bridge was theirs for the taking as Australia's first innings shriveled on a parched Trent Bridge morning, they reckoned without Ashton Agar.

England's employment of deep fields to Hughes, a specialist batsman who was blocking, with the intention of bowling to Agar, a No. 11 dismissing the ball to all parts, looked increasingly clownish, a manual that no longer applied.