Watson and Hughes lead Australia's fightback

Australia's openers capitalised on a flattening pitch and a Pakistani reprieve to advance to 0 for 86 in their second innings, reducing to 120 the tourists' overall lead. Shane Watson raised his 1000th Test run with a lofted pull stroke that Danish Kaneria, fielding at fine leg, dropped over the boundary rope on a morning that saw the hosts restore a degree of parity to proceedings.

Pakistan added just two runs to their overnight first-innings total as Doug Bollinger (4 for 72) snuffed out Kaneria with his fifth ball of the morning. That took Pakistan's lead to 206 - their second-highest first-innings advantage over the Australians in 54 years of competition between the two countries - although with the SCG pitch nowhere near as threatening as the opening day, the Australians would not have entirely counted themselves out of the contest.

The hosts began their second-innings riposte in nervous fashion, with Watson french-cutting Mohammad Asif's second legal delivery milimetres from his leg-stump and Phillip Hughes slashing extravagantly at a wide Mohammad Sami offering the next over. The SCG crowd applauded when Hughes shouldered arms to his next delivery, and the young opener appeared to take the message to heart as he shelved his attacking instincts to see off four maiden overs before the first drinks break.

Watson, meanwhile, adopted a more aggressive mindset and peppered the boundaries with a series of authoritative drives and pull strokes. He was granted two reprieves - Kaneria's dropped catch and, on the stroke of lunch, a bizarre run-out opportunity that saw Kamran Akmal fail to remove the bails with the batsman well short of his ground - but rode his luck to register his eighth score in excess of 50 from 14 innings as a Test opener. Of Watson's 1030 runs scored by the lunch break, 773 had come since his elevation to opener. Clearly, the view at the top agrees with him.

A more circumspect Hughes headed to the break unbeaten on 31 from 71 deliveries. His measured approach was precisely what was required for both the batsman and the team following an inglorious duck in the first innings that preempted a broader Australian collapse.