McGrath's got an eye on greatness

Australian team medics never cease marvelling at how his smooth, natural action, allied to the toughness built into a beanpole kid brought up on backbreaking cotton-picking duty on his dad's outback farm in New South Wales, has managed to limit the strain on his back so he rarely succumbs to injury.

It seems unthinkable, but it's possible that he's actually improving. He's not as quick nor overtly hostile as of old, but the control and accuracy are as unerring as ever, the bounce he finds as disconcerting and the aura ever increasing. It's why he's set to be rewarded by the Australian Cricket Board as the first Australian cricketer to win a milliondollara-year contract next spring.

In this series it's been uncanny how, without any fireworks but with a distinct mellowing of his old theatrical machismo aimed at destabilising batsmen, he has still somehow managed to dominate with three four-wicket hauls. He's long learned not to get too irritated about others such as Jason Gillespie and Brett Lee outpacing him. It's okay if others want to be the fastest, he says, as he's only interested in being the best.

And he is. He had one poor spell in Brisbane when he marked out the wrong run up and Michael Vaughan also caned him on the first day here.

Yet he's still twice dismissed the man he'd apparently targeted as his latest bunny, not to mention rubbing it in with 'The Catch'. However, McGrath probablysees floppy ears flapping from helmets every time an England batsman comes out to bat. In Tests he's dismissed Alec Stewart nine times, Mark Butcher eight, Nasser Hussain seven, John Crawley and Craig White five, and Marcus Trescothick four. With 111 English Test wickets at an average of 19.86, it's almost as if he's making this personal.

So, as Hussain suggested, if we can't beat 'em, we have to learn from 'em. He says his bowlers should "look at the way McGrath bowls, the way he sets up his over". Yet McGrath shrugs that there is no great secret. "Accuracy is the key," he says. "No matter what pace you bowl at, if you can land the ball where you want 99 times out of 100, then you'll get wickets."

Others may be as accurate but what makes McGrath so special, according to his former Test captain Mark Taylor, is not just his metronomic ability to consistently hit that "little area of uncertainty where you are not sure whether to play forward or back", but that he also has "that lovely, tall action" which makes the length so difficult to pick up. No batsman has ever really mastered him.

So how long might he keep nagging England to distraction? Few doubt that, physically, he would be capable of making the 2005 Ashes series because only last year the results of a back scan suggested that here was a bloke who'd never bowled a ball in anger.

And if there's a message from his career, it's that he's set goals and achieved every one from the moment he left the outback at 19 and took his chance playing club cricket in Sydney in between being holed up in a caravan on Bondi. His mates never thought he'd make it because he wouldn't be good enough, yet a decade later, in 1999, Dennis Lillee noted that if McGrath retired there and then, he'd be a legend.

Instead, he keeps rumbling in on those splayed feet and that legend just keeps expanding. Pigeons can be a right menace, but nobody's yet come up with a way of shooing away this pest.