Cricket nerds love precedent, so perhaps England can channel the spirit of Lord’s 2005

TYears later, a montage of the 2005 Ashes still tingles my spine. Close your eyes and you can probably make your own soundtrack, with an Embrace soundtrack if you want to be right. Chances are you’ll see Kevin Pietersen and Andrew Flintoff playing sixes with lustful abandon; Geraint Jones rides away after winning the epic Edgbaston Test; Ashley Giles calmly hammered the winning runs at Trent Bridge; Flintoff’s messianic dismissal of Ricky Ponting at Edgbaston; Simon Jones detonates Michael Clarke’s stump at Old Trafford.

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

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

On Saturday, as two countries 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 reporting. One of them, by Tom Van der Gucht, challenged the prevailing view among English fans that the apocalypse would take place before sunset.

“I feel like this is our Lord’s moment in 2005 and from here we will come back and win the series,” he wrote. “Our bowlers went toe to toe for at least one innings as our batters effectively blew it with a rush of blood to the head. Australia is there for the taking. Mark my words…”

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

The parallels with Lord’s 2005 are compelling, if imperfect. Some details are distorted, like dreams in a David Lynch film. In that match, for example, it was Australia who batted first and were drowning in testosterone, bowling out for 190 in 40.2 overs. An immense bowling performance on the first night – 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 knocked England out of the match in the third innings, with Clarke strumming 91 from 106 balls. They won handsomely in the end, but like Perth the win was based on individual greatness (for Mitchell Starc and Travis Head, read McGrath and to some extent Clarke in 2005) rather than a complete team effort.

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

There was also, hidden in plain sight, a detail that would define the series. In an otherwise poor individual performance – “I bottled it” – Flintoff sacked Adam Gilchrist twice. For the remainder of the series, Flintoff was the bogeyman’s bogeyman. There are no obvious parallels in Perth, but we didn’t understand 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 a total of 155 and 180), including a stunning six from the Australian stamp maker.

Above all, on both occasions there was industrial amounts of defamation. England – who entered the 2005 series on a run of 14 wins in 18 Tests, all playing ultra-aggressive cricket – were devastated after Lord’s. It was just another English shower of ash: “a bunch of drops” according to the Mirror, “Vaughan Again Losers” in the sun.

In between Tests the captain, Michael Vaughan, bowled twice at Lord’s and met the coach, Duncan Fletcher, to do some technical work in the nets. They continued to talk about how submissive, apart from Pietersen, England’s batting had been at Lord’s. “The loss in the first Test was actually the changeover,” Fletcher said later. “We said, ‘Enough is enough now. If we keep this up, we’re going to get drilled again.'”

With McGrath absent – another strange detail, as Pat Cummins may return to Brisbane – England moved to 132 for one from 27 overs on the first morning at Edgbaston. In the end they won 407 from 79.2 overs, an unprecedented attack at the time; their approach changed from calculated risk to dizzying recklessness. “The way we played that first day was the turning point of the entire series,” Vaughan said.

Stokes’ team yearns for a similar turning point, but they are not in favor of a turning point. Last week in Perth they were finally defeated by an all-time great innings from Head, Bazball’s platonic ideal. He just had a much smarter game plan.

Fletcher’s 2005 quote can be adapted to the wants and needs of this team. Hyper-aggressive cricket is their only chance to win in Australia, but they also need to adapt their approach. If they continue to drive on the tall stump in Brisbane, they will be drilled again. And if that happens, the 2025-26 Ashes montages will be full of England batsmen coming out, not their bowlers delivering token blows on the first day of the series.