All hail Sir Freddie!!

What a morning, what a spell and more importantly what a test match. After a nail biting draw in Cardiff where last pair Jimmy Anderson and Monty Panesar managed to survive 10 overs to hang on all the momentum seemed to be with Australia and it all came down to the toss and who would get first use of a very good lords pitch with no cloud cover and the ball not doing anything.

Well thankfully for us Andrew Strauss won the toss and at 196-0 midway through the first day it seemed that England were All over their counterparts however after a usual England batting collapse it was left to the England last pair to put on 47 and manage to get England up to a respectable but nowhere near enough 425, or so the pundits where saying that it wasn't enough.

Come the end of the Australian first innings though and even the most pessimistic of English cricket fans could have been forgiven for getting their hopes up as we lead by over 200 runs and could have enforced the follow on but of course Straussy chose to bat again and that looked to be a good choice as the England openers raced onto 57-0 at lunch on day 3 and the lead was increasing. What followed was one of the strangest bits of test match cricket I have ever seen where Ravi Bopara (27 runs off 93 balls) and Kevin Peitersen (44 off 101) really struggled against some fairly average bowling and almost handed all momentum back to Australia. Enter Prior, Collingwood and Flintoff who with a quick 145 runs between them set Australia a mammoth total of over 500 to chase down.

Things were going swimmingly when Australia were reduced to 128-5 and thoughts turned to the win and maybe even having the final day off, yeah not likely. Michael Clarke and Brad Haddin proceeded to put on 185 runs to get them up to 313-5 at the start of the last day. They say cometh the hour and cometh the man and this hour was Freddie Flintoff's and his hostile, accurate and rapid spell that accounted for the wickets of Haddin, Hauritz and Siddle soon saw the Australians bowled out for 206 and England had beaten the Australians by 115 runs.

So with this being Andrew Flintoff's final test match series what a better way for him to depart than with his first 5 wicket haul at lords for England and a place forever on the honour boards for that magnificent spell of bowling late Sunday and early Monday morning. So with 2 tests down England lead 1-0 and with 3 more to play can Ricky ponting become known as the captain that lost the ashes twice to England in 2 away ashes tours? We shall see.