Will they be summer's history boys?

For more than a century, England have failed to win a home Ashes series in the same season as a Lions tour victory. As Shane Williams and Andrew Flintoff hope to change that, the two sporting giants talk fate, fears and fatherhood. Read the Brian Viner interview in the Telegraph.

Sitting before me in a warehouse in an enterprise park in Manchester, incongruously, are two men whose form and fitness could determine whether this sporting summer is a vintage one for these islands. Shane Williams, rugby union superstar, and Andrew Flintoff, cricketing colossus, have never met before, yet there is plenty of common ground. They were born in the same year, 1977, and together they have a chance of making history, or at least of achieving something never done in their lifetimes. Not since 1971 in New Zealand have the British and Irish Lions won a series in the same year that England's cricketers have captured the Ashes, winning what are surely the two supreme battles for sporting supremacy between the British Isles and the old outposts of empire.