Testy cricket - Rowdy scenes as England and Australia vie for spirit of the Ashes

Frankly, it's just not Bazball, old boy. On a febrile, toxic, at times mildly hallucinogenic day at Lord's, the cricketers of England and Australia produced one of the most obscurely rancorous days of high summer sport ever seen in this country.

- Barney Ronay

Australia's players were barracked by MCC members as they walked into the pavilion at the lunch break, with reports of "physical contact" initiated by the red-trousered ultras. The Lord's crowd booed and jeered across four gruelling hours from midday to the close of play, a level of hostility that has surely never been witnessed inside this most mannered of environments, a place where a day's cricket can often feel less like elite sport and more like a garden party that got out of hand.

Statements were fired out by the Australian team, and an apology offered by a deeply embarrassed MCC, an institution that has for 200 years presented itself as the embodiment of starchy-collared Englishness and a (strictly localised) sense of fair play. All that was really missing was a furious diplomatic cable and threat to take the next steamship back to Sydney.

In the best cricketing tradition of behavioural etiquette, the entire occasion turned on the exact timing of a man in a hat saying the word "over" while another man prodded a patch of manicured north London clay with a piece of wood.

The moment that sparked the ill feeling occurred shortly before 1pm, with England chasing victory on the final day and the captain, Ben Stokes, batting with Jonny Bairstow. Cameron Green bowled an uneventful final ball of his over to Bairstow, who briefly grounded his bat behind his crease and walked down the pitch towards his batting partners.