Dust settles swiftly on cricket matches these days. They follow one another like tube trains in the rush hour. With little time for recuperation or recrimination, the show moves to Lord's tomorrow, though nerves have barely been soothed since Cardiff's dramatic first Test match and the sweat has had little time to dry.

It is all very well for the players, but do they realise the strain on the rest of us? Like flashing bulbs or strong language, a public warning needs to be issued about matches for the Ashes.

England's team, probably to be augmented by Stephen Harmison, a timely card for the selectors to produce after the narrowest of escapes in Wales, need no warning about Lord's and its effect on their opponents. Australia sides have triumphed there in five of the past six matches. They lost only once in the 20th century and they have not yet been beaten in the 21st.

Lord's was where Andrew Flintoff's star started to descend, when he led the team against Sri Lanka in 2006 and bowled himself into the ground attempting the improbable feat of flogging two dead horses at once, himself and the pitch. He bowled 68 overs and three balls in that game, the start of his ankle trouble. Now it is the knee. If Brett Lee and Flintoff are both absent this week the occasion will lack some charisma on both sides, but the game moves on with cruel haste.

Unless the weather plays a significant part the chances are that bowling will be hard work again for both sides this week, especially if England's batsmen can eradicate the indiscipline that was so admirably punished by Ricky Ponting and his colleagues at the SWALEC Stadium. If Graham Onions plays he will find that taking seven wickets in a match against Australia, as he did against West Indies in May, demands much more. The early-season juice has gone from the grass and the Australia batsmen have come here to make runs not money.

To any cricketer, not least those members of the Australia touring team who have not played a Test here (Ponting, Michael Clarke and Simon Katich are the only three who have, assuming Lee is out), the very name Lord's exudes a magic possessed by no other ground. Year after year starry-eyed young players arrive at St John's Wood for the first time and marvel at the grandeur of the rust-hued pavilion, a stately sentinel over the sloping field on which Grace and Spofforth fought their battles 125 years ago.

Stimulated into further grand expansion plans by the recent upstarts, the Riverside Stadium in Durham, the Rose Bowl near Southampton and now by the SWALEC Stadium, Lord's is challenged from across the river by the Brit Oval and envied by the other traditional grounds, Headingley, Trent Bridge and Old Trafford, but it remains the supreme venue. Cosseted by modern mowing machines, it waits in vivid green splendour for the next chapter in the long story of Anglo-Australian rivalry.

There will be no excuse for misfields on an immaculate outfield, but it is the 22 yards in the middle of Mick Hunt's scrupulously tended square that will decide whether England can improve on Cardiff. Outplayed on a dead slow pitch, on which the home spinners were supposed to excel, they cannot be confident that a little extra pace and bounce here will redress the balance.

Never again, alas, will there be a rain-affected pitch such as the one on which Hedley Verity took his 14 wickets in a day in 1934. Not only is the pitch now covered, but the covers also keep out the rain that would once seep under the tarpaulins in heavy weather, helped by the nine foot slope.

I have been to 12 England v Australia Tests here since 1968. Only on that first occasion, when David Brown, John Snow and Barry Knight bowled Australia out for 78 in their first innings after a wonderfully uninhibited Colin Milburn had top-scored in England's 351, did a home victory seem likely. Australia followed on but they were saved by rain at 127 for four, just as England almost certainly were after Glenn McGrath had bowled them out for 77 in 1997.

Lord's has become a haven for batsmen, especially in mid-summer but it is the low-scoring games, rather than the run bonanzas, that one tends to remember. In 1972 Bob Massie's phenomenal swing in humid weather simply had to be seen to be believed. He moved the ball sideways in the air like a golf ball in a stiff wind. Snow bowled at his best in Australia's first innings after Massie had taken the first of his two eight-wicket hauls but Greg Chappell's masterly 131, was just as important in Australia's eight-wicket victory as Massie's 16 for 137. The 56 made by his elder brother, Ian, was the next highest score on either side.

The previous Ashes Test at Lord's four years ago was memorable mainly for the bowling of Harmison and McGrath on the first day, England's fatal dropped catches in the second innings and Kevin Pietersen's two confident fifties in his first Test. It is a balancing act for groundsmen but we need more pitches that sort the batsmen from the boys.