Can England channel spirit of Lord's 2005 to stage comeback?

Vaughan's side tweaked but stuck with an aggressive style after a first-Test mauling and this is tourists' best bet now

- Rob Smyth

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.