I looked at the facts before I started writing this. Big mistake. Huge. Because it's not about facts at all. It's about memory. It's not what happens that matters: it's what you think happens. We all live our lives on that principle, and it works especially well in matters of love and sport.

We have an Ashes series coming up: England v Australia, five Test matches in England, and over a century of sporting history behind them. If the current series leaves memories half as powerful as those of the Ashes of 2005, we'll have a truly wonderful summer of sport.

I looked up the details of that unforgettable series and I wrote down some names and some numbers, and they're all useful enough if you want to reconstruct the series, recall the exact sequence of events, analyse how it happened and work out who was responsible for it all.

But the details won't explain how it lived, and how it still lives; the facts are now fuzzed and faded but the gloriously unreliable memories are still packed with meaning.

Sport, as I have said more than once, is a living, unfolding mythology: vast collisions of archetypes in archetypal situations of conflict and camaraderie. This mythology is not found in the number of runs or the time of dismissal but in the way we remember what happened, the way we talk about it, write about it, even sing about it.

Down the road my old friend Evans had put his dog on the lead ready for a walk. "I'd tried everything else to take that last wicket. This was my last resort"

So let's not go too deeply into England's record and England's ranking: all that really matters is that England hadn't won an Ashes series since 1986-87 (fact, sorry) and that Australia had held the Ashes since 1989 (sorry, won't do it again). It was 16 years of humiliation and it felt like a century.

"I really don't mind if we lose again. Just so long as it's close. So long as we compete. So long as we make a match of it." A conversation that took place in a thousand bars as the business began.

So let me tell you about one of the finest sporting hushes I ever heard. Second ball of the series. Lord's. Steve Harmison bowling for England. Whack! The ball jumped from a length and smote Justin Langer on the elbow and everything stopped while he was treated.

Everything stopped while all England - players and public alike - realised that the impossible had just been possibilised. England really did have a chance. And in a long, breathless moment we savoured the idea that miracles sometimes happen. And could again.

Alas, by the end of the match England had capitulated as meekly as always, bowing down before the great Glenn McGrath. My sports editor at the Times and I agreed that the series was gone. I went on a family holiday while the cricket continued at Edgbaston.

Vaughan with the cup that cheers © AFP

McGrath got injured while farting about with a rugby ball before the match, and that changed things. Ricky Ponting, the Australian captain, still derisively inserted England, knowing that the Poms would collapse as they always did when the heat was on. And England were stung. They fought back and scored 400 in the day.

I watched most of the match on television at my father's place in Cornwall, both of us cheering and groaning by turn. And oh, that last, wondrous, ghastly morning when Australia lurched inch by horrible inch towards a winning total, defying all that England could bowl at them. The last-wicket stand went on and on. It was unbearable.

Down the road my old friend Evans had put his dog on the lead, ready for a walk. Couldn't take any more. "I'd tried everything else to take that last wicket. This was my last resort." He was at the door when, with three runs needed, Michael Kasprowicz gloved one to the wicketkeeper and it was all over. England had won by two runs.

The joy was not of the jumping-about kind. It was white-faced, open-mouthed, slack-jawed relief, mingled with shattered disbelief. And then, in one of the great mythical tableaux that sport can produce, Andrew Flintoff squatted on his haunches to console the desolate Brett Lee.

"It's one-all now, you Aussie bastard." So Flintoff likes to tell the tale now, and it's a decent enough joke. But in memory that moment was delicate, beautiful, profound, almost prayerful. We were all grateful for Flintoff's generosity. Triumphalism is for wimps.

This was the summer of stab-fright: you are too fearful to exploit your advantage, and so you hand victory back to your beaten opponent

So I was present at all the rest of the matches, and what I remember most was England's persistent reluctance to win. They were the better team in every aspect of the game save that of winning. They hadn't got the practice, not against Australia. They couldn't actually believe they were winning, and so they didn't.

The sense of disbelief echoed across the nation: this can't really be happening, can it? We can't really be outplaying Australia, can we? And so in the third Test, at Old Trafford, England were the better team but this time Australia managed to bat out the draw.

In the Modesty Blaise books, the greatest thrillers ever written, the heroine talks about "stab-fright" and "trigger-freeze": those occasions when at the very moment of commitment, your nerve fails. You are too fearful to exploit your advantage, and so you hand victory back to your beaten opponent. This was the summer of stab-fright.

Gary Pratt. Matthew Hoggard's cover-drive. Not the way it was planned. Ponting cracked after he had been run out by a substitute fielder in the fourth Test at Trent Bridge. That was Pratt. As he left the pitch, Ponting let out a mad volley of abuse at the England dressing room, accusing them of cheating. This crack-up was as significant as his dismissal. The Australian captain had lost it in public. England must surely win now. Mustn't they?

They made heavy weather of it, but they finally got over the line. They made the 129 runs they needed in the last innings, though they dropped seven wickets on the way - finally relying on the batsmanship of Hoggard to get them though.

The roof is on fire: fans find themselves a vantage point on day five of the Oval Test © Getty Images

But even this was mild stuff compared to the final match, at The Oval. England needed a draw to win the series, Australia needed a win to level it and keep the damned Ashes. It rained, but it didn't rain enough. And then at last the Australians blinked.

They dropped Kevin Pietersen two times: and Pietersen responded with a truly demented assault on the bowling of Lee. As England batted with the draw in mind, Pietersen put the match beyond Australia with all-out attack. It was an insanely high-risk strategy that came off thanks to the mistakes Australia made in the field - and perhaps because they couldn't believe what was happening in front of them.

"Play your natural game," the England captain, Michael Vaughan, had told Pietersen. So he played a mad caricature of his natural game, and provoked national rejoicing.

It was the last time England have been united as a nation by cricket. It was also the last time that Test match cricket was on free-to-air terrestrial television. The unfolding narrative of the series dominated the summer.

And it's remembered, at least in England, as a time of enchantment, of the kind we knew again at the London Olympic Games of 2012, when joy dominated the agenda and the real cares of the world seemed little more than an irritating distraction from more important matters like sport. Life, we all thought, should be like this.

Pietersen played a mad caricature of his natural game, and provoked national rejoicing. It was the last time England have been united as a nation by cricket

Flintoff - Freddie - was rightly made Man of the Series, and then Wisden's Leading Cricketer in the World. I know: I wrote the piece. I subsequently had a dispute in print with the excellent Michael Atherton when I referred to Flintoff as "a great cricketer".

Wrong, Athers said. Not great. He lacks longevity; he lacks the career-spanning numbers that separate the true greats of the game from the rest. Fair point, but that's an assessment based on the facts.

For in my memory, in most English memories, Flintoff really was a great cricketer. He was great - indisputably great - for the six weeks of that Ashes series, taking 24 wickets and scoring 402 runs. Crucially, he mastered Adam Gilchrist, who would otherwise have been the difference between the two sides. As things turned out, the difference was Freddie.

At least I think so. Certainly it seems that way now. It's an old Fleet Street saying: when faced with a choice between the truth and the legend, print the legend. Because, at least in a sense, the legend is always truer than the truth.

The literal truth can be found in the fat yellow book that comes out every year, and in the numbers and words you can reach with a few clicks on ESPNcricinfo. But the deeper truth of all sport lies in the way that we remember the events, what they mean to us, how they affected us, how they changed us. The deeper truth is beyond numbers: fabled by the daughters of memory.

Simon Barnes is a former chief sportswriter of the Times and the author of more than 20 books

© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.

 

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