Cricket nerds love precedent so maybe England can channel spirit of Lord’s 2005

Twenty years on, a montage of the 2005 Ashes still tingles the spine. Close your eyes and you can probably make your own, with an Embrace soundtrack if you want to be right on the nose. Chances are you’ll see Kevin Pietersen and Andrew Flintoff belting sixes with lusty abandon; Geraint Jones wheeling away after winning the epic Edgbaston Test; Ashley Giles calmly patting the winning runs at Trent Bridge; Flintoff’s messianic dismissal of Ricky Ponting at Edgbaston; Simon Jones detonating Michael Clarke’s off-stump at Old Trafford.

All those moments came in England victories or winning draws. But no 2005 montage is complete without images of Ponting being cut below the eye or Justin Langer’s right elbow ballooning in real time. Both wounds were inflicted by Steve Harmison on the first morning at Lord’s, a game that Australia won emphatically by 239 runs. When the story of the series was written, those blows – and the way England duffed Australia up in the first innings – were an essential chapter.

The hope for England fans is that any montages of the 2025-26 Ashes will include similar moments from Perth: Steve Smith being hit twice on the elbow and once on the hand, Cameron Green wobbling like a drunken sailor after wearing a beauty from Mark Wood on the side of the head.

On Saturday, as two nations tried to make sense of the first two-day Ashes Test in more than a century, dozens of emails were sent to the Guardian’s over-by-over coverage. One, from Tom Van der Gucht, countered the prevailing view among England fans that the apocalypse was due before sundown.

“I have a feeling this is our Lord’s 2005 moment and we’ll come back and win the series from here,” he wrote. “Our bowlers, for at least one innings, went toe to toe while our batters effectively blew it with a rush of blood to the head. Australia are there for the taking. You mark my words …”

Cricket nerds love a precedent. In this case, England fans will cling to anything that doesn’t involve a wearingly familiar story: England lose the first Test in Australia, then the second, then the third …

The manner in which Steve Smith was made to feel uncomfortable on day one in Perth should encourage England. Photograph: Asanka Brendon Ratnayake/Reuters

The parallels with Lord’s 2005 are compelling if imperfect. Some of the details have been twisted, like dreams in a David Lynch film. In that game, for example, it was Australia who batted first and drowned in testosterone, bowled out for 190 in 40.2 overs. An immense bowling performance on the first evening – in this case by Glenn McGrath rather than the entire England attack – gave them a first-innings lead. This is where the stories diverge: Australia batted England out of the game in the third innings, with Clarke strumming 91 from 106 balls. They won handsomely in the end, but like Perth the victory was built on individual greatness (for Mitchell Starc and Travis Head, read McGrath and to an extent Clarke in 2005) rather than a complete team performance.

In both Tests, a much-hyped England pace attack showed they could unsettle and unseat the Australian batters. Smith hasn’t struggled as much in a Test innings since he was a leg-spinner who batted a bit. In 2005 England didn’t really wound the Australian batters after Lord’s – partly because that was the liveliest pitch, mainly because the physical threat, unprecedented for an England attack against Australia, had been established.

There was also, hiding in plain sight, a detail that would define the series. In an otherwise poor individual performance – “I bottled it” – Andrew Flintoff dismissed Adam Gilchrist twice. For the rest of the series, Flintoff was the bogeyman’s bogeyman. There are no obvious parallels at Perth but then we didn’t appreciate the significance of Flintoff’s wickets at the time. Harry Brook’s first-innings fifty also had echoes of Kevin Pietersen’s outrageous batting (57 and 64 not out in totals of 155 and 180), including a gobsmacking six off Australia’s postage-stamp seamer.

Most of all, on both occasions there were industrial quantities of opprobrium. England – who went into the 2005 series on a run of 14 wins in 18 Tests, all achieved playing ultra-aggressive cricket – were savaged after Lord’s. They were just another English Ashes shower: “a bunch of drips” according the Mirror, “Vaughan Again Losers” in the Sun.

Between Tests, the captain, Michael Vaughan, bowled twice at Lord’s, met the coach, Duncan Fletcher, to do some technical work in the nets. They kept talking about how submissive, Pietersen aside, England’s batting had been at Lord’s. “The loss in the first Test actually was the switch,” said Fletcher later. “We said: ‘Enough is enough now. If we carry on like this we will get drilled again.’”

Marcus Trescothick led England’s counterattack on the first morning at Edgbaston in 2005. Photograph: Reuters

With McGrath absent – another twisted detail, given Pat Cummins may return at Brisbane – England skedaddled to 132 for one from 27 overs on the first morning at Edgbaston. They eventually belted 407 from 79.2 overs, an unprecedented onslaught at the time; their approach veered from calculated risk to giddy recklessness. “The manner in which we played on that first day,” said Vaughan, “was the turning point of the entire series.”

Stokes’s team crave a similar turning point, but they are not for turning. At Perth last week they were ultimately beaten by an all-time-great innings from Head, the platonic ideal of Bazball. He just had a much smarter gameplan.