Few phrases make the hackles rise as reliably as ‘the Spirit of Cricket’. When Ricky Ponting invoked it after the Cardiff Test, it was though he’d committed heresy or infringed copyright. Certainly, Marylebone Cricket Club is making the most of the Lord’s Test to accentuate the game’s positive, with today being the Spirit of Cricket Day, children from schools in Halifax, Cheltenham, Chichester and Huncote showing off their skills on the outfield at lunchtime today under the tutelage of Charlotte Edwards and Katherine Brunt. The schools are part of the ‘Chance to Shine’ initiative of the not-for-profit Cricket Foundation, which has the noble objective of bringing competitive cricket to a third of state schools by 2015.

‘Chance to Shine’ has thrown its weight behind another no-less noble initiative, Simon Rae’s Unplayable, a cricket novel for young readers launched on Thursday night and reviewed in today’s Guardian. The hero Tom Marlin lives out a dream career, going from overcoming the school bully to tackling the Australians at the Oval. Rae, author of an outstanding biography of W. G. Grace and a stalwart of the South Oxfordshire Amateurs CC, knows of what he writes: he describes action in the middle in a convincingly detailed fashion. If your boy does not grow up with an overpowering urge to wrest the Ashes from Australia after reading Unplayable, he is doomed to a life of football.

‘English conditions’: somehow, everyone in cricket grasps intuitively what this means, even if the bog-standard, straw-coloured ECB pitch has made grounds a great deal more uniform over the last twenty years. Much of the second day of the Second Test at Lord’s yesterday was spent in the grip of atmosphere and meteorology that could have been of no other country – cloud cover, bad light, intermittent rain. Not only that but lunch, tea, and two breaks for drizzle totalling 79 minutes kept bowlers fresh throughout. And as they were their conditions, it was appropriate England should benefit. There was luck involved, Koertzen’s hopelessly muddled decision to give Ponting out a fitting celebration of the 100th Test he has bollocksed up. But Australia has enjoyed enough favour from Koertzen over the years not to have much grounds for complaining: it was fitting that Strauss, whom Koertzen made a habit of sawing off during the last Ashes series, should be the catcher.

It was a tough day for writing. I had to file my Times column at 3pm – these big British Saturday papers raven for early copy – so have written today about the travails of Mitchell Johnson rather than the batting collapse that has probably ended three-quarters of a century of antipodean hegemony at headquarters. But it could be argued that Johnson is a leading indicator of Australia’s problems. Wasting the second new ball at Cardiff cost Australia a 1-0 lead; wasting the first new ball here sent England on its merry way, even if Ben Hilfenhaus and Peter Siddle clawed back some of that advantage. Johnson’s pull shot late yesterday was the stroke of a mind overthrown, and the four other batsmen who perished to the same shot yesterday had not that excuse. In English conditions you shouldn’t be playing Australian shots, or at least not so freely. Katich in particular should revisit a shot that, because he moves so far across, he will always struggle to keep down – he perished in exactly the same manner at Worcester. North’s shot selection, meanwhile, looked like a function of being marooned at the non-striker’s end for too long. A 14-ball duck lasting 33 minutes – it reminded me of that story of Crusoe’s about Surrey’s Miles Howell crafting a 43-minute duck at the Oval against Yorkshire, hitting every ball in the middle of an immaculately straight bat, somehow picking the fieldsmen out with every shot, then being run out by his partner, leaving Crusoe to record his timeless, sweat-soaked protest: ‘Not a run; not even a little one, dammit; and I feel as if I’d sprinted to the House of Commons and back!’
Will England enforce the follow-on, given the opportunity? The weather is insecure enough to suggest it is a wise course. The Lord’s pitch, which is not prone to deterioration, shouldn’t set too many challenges in the fourth innings – and, of course, there is no Shane Warne to cloud resolutions. Whatever the case, England must not waste this opportunity, as Australia did theirs at Cardiff.