Cricket Ashes Series: At long last, thank goodness, the talking stops and the action begins. No more war of words, no more my-dad's-bigger-than-your-dad playground chatter. The time has come to shut up and put up, in that order: amen to that, will be the response from both teams.

Has a Test series ever been subject to such preamble or awaited with such high expectation? Lord's will be packed to the rafters today.

This is a series for its time, one played out between, statistically anyway, the best sides in the world, the one dominant for a decade and more but on the start of an inevitable decline from the Olympian standards it has set; the other vibrant, young, competitive and on the way up.

Somewhere in the not too distant future they will pass each other. Will it be in the next month or so? England have been waiting for this chance, the opportunity to demonstrate that the progress made in the past years has not been simply a camouflage provided by substantially inferior teams.

They know the nature of the challenge ahead, and like most visiting sides the Australians thrive at the game's spiritual home; they are unbeaten there since Bob Wyatt's side beat Bill Woodfull's by an innings 71 years ago.

Like Henry Ford, Michael Vaughan thinks that history is bunk. "What has that got to do with my team?" he mused yesterday.

"Only Duncan Fletcher was around then. If you look too far back you can miss the crucial moment in the game about to start."

Forget the past, was his message, live for the now.

"I'm going to tell my side to enjoy it," he said. "Relax and enjoy it, that is going to be my message to them."

There will be some nerves on both sides, though. England do not want to be seen as all mouth and trousers, their reputation inflated like the blimp that hovers over Regent's Park.

But neither does Ricky Ponting wish to become known as the captain who threw away the invincibility that Allan Border, Mark Taylor and Steve Waugh worked so hard to create.

Vaughan was at pains to knock down the notion that the series will be won or lost in the opening exchanges, and it is true that when in 1997 Australia were floundering at 54 for eight on the first morning at Edgbaston and lost the match, they did not exactly capitulate thereafter.

Yet no one who was there will forget the deflation that came from Phil DeFreitas's opening delivery at the Gabba in 1994, lashed joyously to the fence by Michael Slater, or the stunned silence that greeted the news that Nasser Hussain had put Australia in to bat on the same ground in 2002.

Even in the last series here, Slater, in calculated manner, clambered into Darren Gough's opening over at Edgbaston to make a point.

"It was not a bad over," said Mark Waugh.

It is what happens.

So it is important not just for the series but for the way the England side are perceived by those for whom cricket is but a diversion from the start of the football season that they come out of the blocks.

If they bat, they must make sure they make an impact, that they are not suckered in by Glenn McGrath's surgical skills or Brett Lee's bouncers.

If they bowl first, Matthew Hoggard, an obvious target, must be spot on from the first ball and hope for a swinging day, while Steve Harmison carries forward the rhythm and confidence gained over the past 18 months.

Vaughan knows that much of the Australian talk masks concern that their standards have slipped, and there is a vulnerability there that cannot be papered over if the opposition is allowed to get among them.

Ponting will not need reminding - but we shall do it anyway - that in their past three Tests the much-vaunted batting line-up was reduced by New Zealand, successively, to 160 for five, 247 for five and 226 for five before the remarkable Adam Gilchrist bailed them out.

But if the problem for most sides in the past 10 years has been an inability to sustain the pressure and thus let them off the hook, then England, finally, thanks to form and fitness, have a collection of bowlers not just capable of taking wickets but of sustaining their attack.

Key to this is Simon Jones, sadly injured on the opening day of the last series, but who now can bowl genuine away swing at pace as well as reverse swing with the old ball, and the fitness of Andrew Flintoff, who is capable of fast attack and back-of-a-length defence. He can best disconcert left-handers from around the wicket.

In return, Australia will be looking to make inroads into England's top order knowing that Marcus Trescothick, his recent one-day hundred against them notwithstanding, has yet to show patience outside off stump, that Andrew Strauss must find a way to counter the ball moving in to him, and that Vaughan is yet to recapture the stellar form he showed in Australia. Then they will be into the new boys.

Who will crack? The old men or the young guns? The one certainty is that for the first time in many years Australia will encounter a team confident in its ability, a bit lippy, a bit arrogant and so up for the challenge. A bit like themselves.

"It will be good to see how far this side can go," said Vaughan yesterday.

"We are fresh and excited. We have prepared well and in doing that the performance will take care of itself. We are relaxed and focused. My players won't need telling what this all means. If you can't get up for this challenge then you shouldn't be here." - Guardian Service

ENGLAND: M Vaughan (Yorkshire, capt), M Trescothick (Somerset), A Strauss (Middlesex), I Bell (Warwickshire), K Pietersen (Hampshire), A Flintoff (Lancashire), G Jones (Kent, wkt), A Giles (Warwickshire), S Jones (Glamorgan), M Hoggard (Yorkshire), S Harmison (Durham).

AUSTRALIA (from): R Ponting (capt), M Hayden, J Langer, D Martyn, M Clarke, S Katich, A Gilchrist (wkt), S Warne, B Lee, J Gillespie, G McGrath, M Kasprowicz.

Umpires: Aleem Dar (Pak) and R Koertzen (Rsa). Third umpire: M Benson, Match referee: R Madugalle (Sri).