Tension palpable in Trent Bridge The Australian cricket team's change room at Trent Bridge, Nottingham, ahead of The Ashes test. IN 1961, the photographer Henry Cartier-Bresson asked England's debonair Ted Dexter to be the subject of a pictorial essay about the life of a professional cricketer. When Dexter said yes, the Frenchman came to Sussex for a few days, snapping images around the dressing room and nets, evocative of cricket and of the sporting life generally. Two charming and civilised men enjoyed the collaboration. Dexter's next stop, however, was the First Test of an Ashes series, and Cartier-Bresson asked to tag along for the drive down the M1. To his increasing bemusement, the gracious English conversationalist of the preceding days was gradually replaced by a brooding, taciturn, almost sullen man, given to shorter and shorter answers, and faster and faster driving speeds. By the morning of the match, Dexter's words had dried up completely: he confessed later to feeling both confoundedly rude, and entirely incapable of doing anything about it, because such was the effect of the prospect of playing against Australians. Modern cricket captains do not enjoy the same latitude, always being expected to say something, even if it is nothing: Alastair Cook and Michael Clarke were today exemplary in this regard, conscientiously talking without speaking. Otherwise, there was a pleasing sense of mouth-muting, sphincter-tightening tension around Trent Bridge as it basked in warm sunshine and warmer local self-approbation. Andy Murray and the Lions were freely mentioned during the media preliminaries; nobody invoked the royal reproduction, though perhaps that is to come. Nottingham advertises its cricket antiquity with the unassuming annotation to its brand: 'Trent Bridge, Est 1836.' It sits snugly between the Trent Bridge Inn, whose first publican was the ground's founder William Clarke, and the Larwood & Voce Pub Kitchen, named for the county's foremost cricket pairing. There was a hint of them about today too, or at least their controversial captain Douglas Jardine, as the captains declined to specify their starting XIs. It was Jardine who famously rebuked Australian journalists for seeking similar information from him during the Bodyline series of 1932-33: 'I'm here to win the Ashes, not provide scoops for your ruddy newspapers.' That left the commentariat to cast runes, which they did willingly. Interestingly, the unfancied Australians will be as happy to begin this series here as anywhere. Cook has not made a half-century in eleven Nottingham Tests, and none of his top six colleagues average 40 at the ground; the last Englishman to make a hundred here, Andrew Strauss, is now comfortably ensconsed among the aforesaid commentariat. Cook's slow bowling trump card Graeme Swann also pays 65 runs per wicket at Trent Bridge, despite this having been his county home since 2005. By the same token, only Clarke among the Australians can call on Test experience here, and it is nothing special. Arguably the best prepared of the visitors for the venue is Ed Cowan, with four first-class matches for Nottinghamshire behind him, albeit containing nothing special either. The leading indicator of the Test is likeliest to be the fortunes of James Anderson, for whom this is a hunting ground happy to the point of euphoria: thirty-three wickets in five Tests. If his away curve achieves its usual voluptuous shape, England will be red-hot favourites; if it for some reason does not, Australia will feel a liberating relief. The pitch, which spent most of today shrouded beneath a space-age hot house cum hovercraft, will most probably be revealed as dry and abrasive, conducive to reverse swing, affording an edge to specialist practitioners Mitchell Starc and Tim Bresnan in the composition of final XIs - Bresnan took eight for 141 and scored an unbeaten 39 here against West Indies last year. Trent Bridge is the ground on which Australia secured the Ashes in 1989, 1997 and 2001, where England secured their series-winning lead in 2005. It will not, this time, be a location of such destiny, but may shape a rubber a long time in the offing, and a cycle set to be a long time in the unfolding. For whatever the outcome, a result is foretold, both by the cloudless skies, and by the eleven years that have elapsed since the last draw here. One of Cartier-Bresson's mots about photography was the admonition to capture everything and leave no holes because 'afterwards it will be too late'. It's an exhortation that one fancies will apply quite well to this Test match.