Some years ago, while playing on the far side of Melbourne, the Yarras were confronted with an umpire of supreme inexactitude. One of our batsmen was fired after the ball flew through a flurry of bat and pad without touching either. Still smouldering at tea, he went to the umpire for clarification: ‘So was I out caught behind or lbw?’ The umpire considered briefly before a judicious reply: ‘A bit of both.’

Not a memory I would now expect to amuse Ricky Ponting, victim of the slow-motion assassin Rudi Koertzen, today at quarter speed. Ponting’s own experience was more like black comedy. Jimmy Anderson’s inswinger detoured to slip via Ponting’s pad, flying low; Koertzen sought adjudication from third umpire Nigel Llong about whether what he believed to be a catch had carried, and gave the decision when this was confirmed. Examination of the replay demonstrated cricket’s perversity: the ball had actually eluded the edge, but would have hit the stumps. Llong, however, could not inform Koertzen of this; he had simply to answer Koertzen’s direct question, even though it was based on a misapprehension.

Surely the ultimate cricket perversity: a bad, correct decision. For the referral system would have brought about the same outcome, albeit by arriving at a different conclusion, that Ponting was lbw rather than caught. Kudos to the Australian captain: 15 minutes later he had a smile on his face for presenting his team to the Queen. The Queen smiled back. Koertzen’s accident proneness probably reminds Her Majesty of Prince Phillip.

Last time I was at Lord’s to watch Australian bowling, it was the Glenn McGrath Show. How the narrow man from Narromine loved that Pavilion End, with its helpful slope, and how he hugged those non-striker’s stumps, almost worming his way around them in order to plough his favoured stump-to-stump furrow. With McGrath still in the mind’s eye, it was a wake-up call for all Australians to watch his successors struggle against the slope this morning – Mitchell Johnson in particular, remonstrating inwardly as his direction deserted him. Poor Johnson. He might as well have tried bowling with his right arm. The most forgettable Australian opening spell at Lord’s since Pat Crawford’s? Go on, look it up.

As his old quarry Mike Atherton wrote in The Times this morning, McGrath has been the difference between the two countries at headquarters on their last three meetings, following in a tradition of virtuoso Australian performances: Trumper, Armstrong, Bradman, Miller, Lawry, Massie, Border, Waugh. The lack of McGrath is already palpable at lunch, likewise the strain on a four-man attack when one bowler is obviously below par: Cook will hardly make a less demanding Test fifty. Siddle made better use of the conditions, locating that in-between zone where an inch or two either way is the difference between holding its line and jagging away, although he was less threatening from round the wicket. Stuart Clark with his Middlesex experience might have been a good investment here: we could then comment nostalgically on his oft-remarked resemblance to McGrath! All things being equal, this could be a long day for Australia; for the sake of this series, it had better be.

Most cricket theories have the life of a june bug; some persist, because the facts are fitted to them. The Ashes is a splendid environment in which to observe the latter. On Saturday night while waiting to be the token Aussie on BBC Wales, for instance, I listened to Geoff Boycott’s condemnation of England’s failures, harping on the population density of English ‘backroom staff’, which he numbered at 16. The only backroom staff Boycott ever needed, of course, was his grandmother, that formidable all-rounder beside which so many modern players pale by comparison. There followed a list of great players of the past who needed no such molly-coddling, Len Hutton being mentioned at least half a dozen times, only slightly less often than the speaker himself.

There’s a kernel of truth to Boycott’s complaint. What exactly was Mushtaq Ahmed doing in Cardiff? If Swann and Panesar could not work this pitch out for themselves, then they should not be playing first-class cricket, let alone a Test match. Yet was England ‘backroom staff’, especially Troy Cooley, not the reason so many smart analysts gave for the team’s 2005 triumph? A noteworthy omission from Boycott’s survey was any sense that Australia had played at all well – Ponting’s team were hardly mentioned. It was a long-held gripe of Steve Waugh that Australia’s long run of Ashes victories were always felt here to be an outcome of English failure rather than antipodean excellence. I hope critiques of the 2009 Ashes series don’t also slip into this pattern.

Ponting’s team certainly deserve better. They were excellent on the field, and pretty good off it too. The captain’s press conference after the game was a model. Despite the efforts of the bomb-throwing wing of the Australian press to incite him, he declined to inveigh against the late-innings incursions of England’s twelfth man and physiotherapist. What he actually said was: “I was unhappy with it, but it lasted a couple of minutes, and we got them off the ground. I don’t want to make that big a deal with it. I’m sure others will be taking it up with the England hierarchy, as they should. It’s not the reason we didn’t win. We’ve got to look at those reasons.” From the headlines, you’d think Ponting had had a Bill Woodfull moment. On the contrary, it was a straight answer to a straight question; no dissembling; no provocations.

He can feel well satisfied with his week’s work, and even his ration of fortune. England’s luck in this game was obvious: the toss, first innings, the injury to Lee. Australia’s came disguised: the injury to Lee led to the selection of Hilfenhaus; the absence of Watson left no doubt about North’s position, just as in Australia in 2006-7 when it expedited the return of Clarke. The one series he has completed successfully being Australia’s defeat in India last year, an incapacitated Watson seems almost to have become Ponting’s talisman. It’s a theory anyway – one Watson needs to disprove sooner rather than later.

From an unpromising scenario, Australia and England have conjured a minor classic of Test cricket today, the outcome of five days’ red-blooded striving, in doubt until the last of 2537 legitimate deliveries, keeping the series alive for the Lord’s Test when victory for Australia would probably have been a huge blow to local interest. In 2005, of course, England came back after losing the opening encounter of the series. Then, though, there were nine days between the First and Second Tests; here there are three, and an Australian team still running on the adrenaline of victory would, I suspect, have been virtually unbeatable, on a ground on which they have lost once since 1896.

Proceedings finished at 6.40pm in brilliant sunshine, a stark contrast to the overcast conditions in which much of the game took place, and fit for hours more play. There being no issue with the light, in fact, Ponting’s deployments towards the end were somewhat surprising: only 21 deliveries of the Anderson-Panesar stand were delivered by a pace bowler, Siddle; 36 came from Hauritz and 12 from North. Understanding Ponting’s desire to maximise his balls bowled, all the Australians needed was one ball, the right ball, and the likeliest bowler to bowl it, Hilfenhaus, was trusted with only a dozen last-day overs. We will hear more of this.

Likewise the speculative ventures onto the field of Bilal Shafayat and Steve McCaig, probably more cock-up than conspiracy, but an egregious one. It is time to consider addressing these incursions. In every other game, the presence of reserves, substitutes or ancillary staff is carefully regulated. Cricket still operates on genteel but obsolete assumptions that no player or captain would abuse the privilege they enjoy of requesting new equipment or physical assistance, although we know such visits are seldom about their ostensible purpose. ‘The captain’s sending out new gloves,’ we nod sagely. ‘There must be a message.’ (There’s the famous story about Len Hutton sending Vic Wilson out with a banana when he thought Colin Cowdrey was playing too freely just before lunch. ‘You’re batting so poorly, the captain thought you must be hungry,’ Wilson said.) Bringing these visits more firmly under the jurisdiction of the umpires would remove their ambiguity.

Twenty-four hours ago, the 2009 Ashes were looking a little cold. This result has stirred their embers. More to come when I’ve examined the grate a little more closely.

From ‘good areas’ to ‘death bowling’, phrases come and go in the cricket lexicon. Four years ago, English cricket fans invested Steve Waugh’s neologism ‘mental disintegration’ with an abracadabra quality; now it is seldom heard. On this fourth day at Cardiff, it has made a subtle reappearance, not in its vernacular sense as a straightforward synonym for sledging, but in its original conception, of pushing an opposition team beyond the extent of its endurance. According to Allan Border, the phrase was coined at the Oval Test 20 years ago by Carl Rackemann, who coincidentally has popped up on Sky this week, looking every bit the cattle king, reminiscing about his career. It was Rackemann who, while teammates kicked around declaration targets on the final morning, urged ruthlessness. ‘Full mental and physical disintegration’ would only occur if Australia batted so long that England’s exertions with the ball and in the field were rendered futile. Border did not call his batsmen in until lunch, and 393 in 65 overs he set England almost did the trick: bad light ruled out the last 20 overs with England 143 for 5.

Australia kept England in the field more than 12 hours in this Test, by the end of which the hosts were bowling only because people kept throwing the ball back to them, not out of any expectation it would avail them. Bowlers with one eye on the radar, and the other on the visitors’ balcony, are unlikely to achieve any sort of accuracy. Batsmen who have spent hours aware that they might be minutes away from batting do not come to the crease fresh and firing. Ricky Ponting’s declaration was then timed to a nicety, with just enough time to hurt England, and not quite long enough for England to hurt back; from their nothing to gain, everything to lose position, they stumbled quickly to 21 for 2. Ravi Bopara was assuredly unlikely, but, in contrast to when England bowled, there was the heady waft of wickets in the air, and it won’t have abated by morning. You can expect a few more decisions to go Australia’s way tomorrow. Momentum carries umpires as well as players. And ‘mental disintegration’ is decidedly contagious.

England have spent years trying to invest their cap with the authority of continuity and uniformity that Australia derive from their baggy green, to some effect. But what, in the meantime, have they done to their jumper, whose resemblance to the kind of rubbishy promotional windcheater one finds in the bottom of a sponsor’s showbag is shown up by the old-fashioned elegance of the Australian cableknit sweater (albeit that this, too, is now marred by Cricket Australia’s cock-eyed, lop-sided logo)? Just theorising here, but might this change of attire have something to do with either money, or the latest theory about the performance-enhancing properties of rubbishy promotional windcheaters?

The old jumper should not perish unmourned. On its standard 1981/2005 highlights default setting, Sky has today been showing footage from Headingley twenty-eight years ago, and Ian Botham is impossible to imagine in anything other than the traditional English long-sleeve, tight on his torso, bare of embellishment. How someone could feel a sentimental attachment to the successor item entirely eludes me. As for the shirt, don’t get me started.

Michael Clarke has been a strangely anonymous figure on this tour for a figure with a fiancé and a financial profile such as his. The structure of the trip has had something to do with this. Like his captain, Clarke has no love for Twenty20, at which he averages a modest 17, and strikes at a positively lethargic 106 per 100 balls. His 83 from 145 balls today, however, seemed like a breath of Clarke at his bonny best, now a little further back than commonly imagined. To the end of last year’s series in the Caribbean, Clarke’s Test runs had been accumulated at 56 per hundred balls; since then, under the pressure of an increasing degree of adversity, his scoring rate had dropped to 47. It does not seem much, but it is a reflection of the harder times for Australia over the past year, and Clarke’s growing sense of responsibility as vice-captain for counteracting them.

Today we saw again the cocky, smiley Clarke, pleased to be back in a form of cricket he is at home with, and coming in with a scoreline he is familiar with (three for 325). When he pulled the boundary that confirmed Australia’s lead, one half expected him to take a little jump and click his heels like Danny Kaye. He has made a good start on putting to rights a curious disparity between his record in Australia, where he averages 58, and in other climes, where he averages 40. England may yet test a technique seemingly susceptible to the moving ball – although first they will have to move it.

The friend in whose spare room I am camping during this Test, Arun, manages a portfolio of local rental flats, which in this Test match week, also graduation week at Cardiff’s university, are in heavy demand. Yesterday he had a call seeking digs from an Australian who had just arrived with a family of five. There must be places to stay, mustn’t there? They weren’t that interested in cricket in Wales, were they? Such was the Aussie’s genial guilelessness that Arun almost forgot he had just had a cancellation. Result: optimism rewarded.

Australia’s selection for this Cardiff Test has a tang of optimism to it too, backing four bowlers with no prior English experience to bowl England out twice – a vestige of the days when raw meat and a baggy green were the only preparation an Aussie needed for sticking it to the Poms. There was a pleasing vernacular quality to the pace attack: plumber’s mate (Johnson), bricklayer (Hilfenhaus) and woodchopper (Siddle), destined inevitably for tradesmanlike performances, ahead of the banker (Clark), doubtless to Alistair Darling’s satisfaction. Hauritz played because if he hadn’t he might as well have packed for home, but in all it was right choice: the one cause for Australian concern is what can be inferred about Clark, who with a rumour of form would have been among the first picked.

Optimism was here rewarded too. At every point in the day when Ricky Ponting must have ached for a wicket, his bowlers broke through, in the cases of Cook, Collingwood and Flintoff against the run of play, and in the case of Pietersen against the flow of logic. Has any batsman of quality found such eccentric methods of dismissal as Pietersen? What might have been endearing, furthermore, is now a genuine handicap to his progress. Great batsmen at their best leave bowlers without hope; Pietersen always gives his opponents a whiff, and the reputation diminishes him. Times have changed since Mike Gatting entered the annals of ignominy against Australia twenty-two years ago for a reverse sweep when such a stroke was tantamount to lese majeste. Had Gatting played Pietersen’s stroke and vice versa, Pietersen might still be in, and Gatting wearing an ermine robe in the House of Lord’s rather than drinking for his country in the ECB hospitality marquee.

A few more sessions like the last, chockfull of strokes and wickets, and this series might begin standing on its own feet rather than being, as it sometimes seems on Sky, a flimsy pretext for interspersing highlights of 2005. Ponting, having been rewarded for his faith in Hauritz with Pietersen’s wicket, somewhat belatedly went back to Hilfenhaus, the most consistent of his pacemen, who will bowl worse for better figures than today. Three quicks plus Hauritz might not be enough for Australia some days this summer, but the individuals concerned will run in hopefully all day – and that is a quality bound to be rewarded.

The Ashes series that begins tomorrow at Cardiff will be the 20th I have watched as fan and journalist, enough to make anyone feel their seniority if not their obsolescence. I have vivid recollections of each, and senses of change to go with the general continuity, two of which have stood out recently in contemplating my very earliest memories of Anglo-Australian competition.

In 1974-75, the first Ashes series I saw, Derek Underwood provided the only variation on right-arm over-the-wicket, and John Edrich the only exception amid the phalanxes of right-handed specialist batsmen (Wally Edwards was there for Australia too, but, I hope he’ll pardon me saying, never for long).

Cricket today is almost unthinkably different. For the third consecutive Ashes series, the opening batsmen on both sides will be left-handed; likewise four of Australia’s top six. Mitchell Johnson is the first left-arm quick to lead an Australian attack in England since Alan Davidson; Simon Katich should purvey the first Australian chinamen since Chuck Fleetwood-Smith; England have excluded Ryan Sidebottom, but might yet opt for Monty Panesar.

This not only makes for more various cricket, full of angles and inclines, tugging techniques in different directions, but adds a particular layer of complication to a captain’s deliberations in England, where the gradient of grounds is a factor as in no other country, and pitches are soft enough to wear unpredictably. How, for instance, might the excavations of Johnson’s front foot enhance Graeme Swann’s effectiveness to Ricky Ponting and Michael Clarke, Australia’s best players of slow bowling? How might they complicate the challenges to Matt Prior’s glovework?

In 1974-75, Australia enjoyed an advantage in sheer pace not experienced by an Ashes side for 20 years: Jeff Thomson and Dennis Lillee omnipotent reigned. Yet we never knew exactly how quick they really were: pace was verified the old-fashioned way, correlating the length of the ball with the height of the bounce, the batsmen’s degree of hurry, and in due course their observable flinching. Australians were happy enough with two ideas: Thomson and Lillee were very quick, and they were on our side.

With the modern craving for quantification has come the tyranny of the speed gun, these days rather more reliable than the one I saw at Headingley many years ago clocking an admittedly languid Alan Mullally at 11mph. With Brett Lee’s incapacitation for the First Test, reported the Daily Mail this morning, England achieved a vital edge in speed: ‘The Aussies are still not short of pace and Mitchell Johnson can deliver at 94mph – although Stuart Broad is capable of matching that. England also have Freddie Flintoff, Jimmy Anderson (both 93mph) and Graham Onions (90mph), and there is always Steve Harmison (96mph) in reserve. Peter Siddle (92mph), Shane Watson (90mph), Ben Hilfenhaus (89mph) and Stuart Clark (88mph) are Ricky Ponting’s other pace aces.’ Never mind the scoreboard – look at the speedo!

Silly stuff, of course, and not merely because it looks like Shane Watson will only clock 90mph this season in a sports car. Cricket’s infatuation with precision of pace also still contains a degree of backward-looking: the game remains stubbornly imperial in a metric age. Yet it has had its impact, even at first-class level. ‘In the county game whenever the TV cameras turn up, so does the speed gun,’ admits Martin Bicknell in his recent autobiography. ‘All the bowlers are conscious of it; they want to be the fastest bowler on show.’ He says that what worried him most about his return to Test cricket was how surveillance would confirm the passage of years. It seems almost spoiling the game to recall that the most effective seam bowler in the corresponding Test four years ago was the slowest on either side, Glenn McGrath.

One element of the Ashes that has not changed is the acute sense of accompanying expectation. The anticipation here has been sharpened by the summer’s structure, Twenty20’s unrelenting roll. Everything stops for the Ashes; everything has to stop for the Ashes. Let’s hope it is worth the stopping, and always will be.