The Ashes is a
Test cricket series, played between
England and
Australia. It is one of international cricket's most celebrated
rivalries and dates back to 1882. It is currently played biennially, alternately in England and Australia. However, since cricket is a summer game, the venues being in opposite hemispheres means the break between series alternates between 18 and 30 months. A series of "The Ashes" now comprises five Test matches, two innings per match, under the regular rules for international Test-match cricket. If a series is drawn then the country already holding the Ashes retains them.
The series is named after a
satirical obituary published in an English newspaper,
The Sporting Times, in 1882 after the match at
The Oval in which Australia beat England on an English ground for the first time. The obituary stated that English cricket had died, and the body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia. The English media then dubbed the next English tour to Australia (1882–83) as the quest to regain The Ashes.
During that tour in Australia, a small
terracotta urn was presented as a gift to the
England captain Ivo Bligh by a group of
Melbourne women. The contents of the urn are reputed to be the ashes of an item of cricket equipment, possibly a
bail, ball or stump. Some Aborigines hold that The Ashes are in fact those of King Cole, the cricketer who toured England in 1868.
[1] The Dowager Countess of Darnley, meanwhile, claimed recently that her mother-in-law (and Bligh's wife), Florence Morphy, said that they were the remains of a lady's veil.
The urn is erroneously believed, by some, to be the
trophy of the Ashes series but it has never been formally adopted as such and Ivo Bligh always considered it to be a personal gift.
[2] Replicas of the urn are often held aloft by victorious teams as a symbol of their victory in an Ashes series, but the actual urn has never been presented or displayed as a trophy in this way. Whichever side holds the Ashes, the urn normally remains in the
Marylebone Cricket Club Museum at
Lord's since being presented to the MCC by Ivo Bligh's widow upon his death.
[3]Since the 1998–99 Ashes series, a
Waterford Crystal representation of the Ashes urn has been presented to the winners of an Ashes series as the official trophy of that series.
Australia currently holds The Ashes, after beating England 5–0 to regain them in
2006–07. The next Ashes series will be held in England in 2009.
npower currently sponsor the Ashes series played in England.
Legend of The AshesThe first Test Match between England and Australia was played in 1877, but the Ashes legend dates back only to the ninth Test Match, played in 1882.
On their tour of England that year, the Australians played just one Test, at
The Oval in London. It was a low-scoring affair on a difficult
wicket.
[4] Australia made a mere 63 runs in its first
innings, and England, led by
"Boss" Hornby, took a 38-run lead with a total of 101. In their second innings, the Australians, boosted by a spectacular run-a-minute 55 from
Hugh Massie, managed 122, which left England only 85 runs to win.
The Australians were greatly demoralised by the manner of their second-innings collapse, but fast bowler
Fred Spofforth, spurred on by some
gamesmanship on the part of his opponents, refused to give in. "This thing can be done," he declared. Spofforth went on to devastate the English batting, taking his final four wickets for only two runs to leave England just seven runs short of victory in one of the closest and most nail- (or umbrella-) biting finishes in the
history of cricket.
When
Ted Peate, England's last batsman, came to the crease, his side needed just ten runs to win, but Peate managed only two before he was bowled by
Harry Boyle. An astonished Oval crowd fell silent, struggling to believe that England could possibly have lost to a colony. When it finally sunk in, however, the crowd swarmed onto the field, cheering loudly and chairing Boyle and Spofforth to the pavilion.
When Peate returned to the pavilion, he was reprimanded by his peers for not allowing
Charles Studd, his partner, to get the runs. Although Studd was one of the best batsman in England, having already hit two centuries that season against the colonists, Peate replied, "I had no confidence in Mr Studd, sir, so thought I had better do my best."[
citation needed]
The momentous defeat was widely recorded in the English press, which praised the Australians for their plentiful "pluck" and berated the Englishmen for their lack thereof. A celebrated poem appeared in
Punch on Saturday, 9 September. The first verse (quoted most frequently) reads thus:
Well done, Cornstalks! Whipt us
Fair and square,
Was it luck that tript us?
Was it scare?
Kangaroo Land's 'Demon'
[5], or our own
Want of 'devil', coolness, nerve, backbone?
On 31 August, in the great
Charles Alcock-edited magazine Cricket: A Weekly Record of The Game, there appeared a now-obscure mock obituary:
SACRED TO THE MEMORY
OF
ENGLAND'S SUPREMACY IN THE
CRICKET-FIELD
WHICH EXPIRED
ON THE
29TH DAY OF AUGUST, AT THE OVAL
----
"ITS END WAS PEATE"
----
Two days later, on 2 September, a second, more celebrated mock obituary, written by
Reginald Brooks under the pseudonym "Bloobs", appeared in
The Sporting Times. It read as follows:
In Affectionate Remembrance
of
ENGLISH CRICKET,
which died at the Oval
on
29th AUGUST, 1882,
Deeply lamented by a large circle of sorrowing
friends and acquaintances
----
R.I.P.
----
N.B.—The body will be cremated and the
ashes taken to Australia.
Ivo Bligh fastened on to this notice and promised that, on the tour to Australia in 1882–83 (which he was to captain), he would regain "the ashes". He spoke of them again several times over the course of the tour, and the Australian media quickly caught on. The three-match series resulted in a two-one win to England, notwithstanding a fourth match, won by the Australians, whose status remains a matter of ardent dispute.
In the twenty years following Bligh's campaign, the term "The Ashes" largely disappeared from public use. There is no indication that this was the accepted name for the series – at least not in England. The term became popular again in Australia first, when
George Giffen, in his memoirs (With Bat and Ball, 1899), used the term as if it were well known.
[6]The true and global revitalisation of interest in the concept dates from 1903, when
Pelham Warner took a team to Australia with the promise that he would regain "the ashes". As had been the case on Bligh's tour twenty years before, the Australian media latched fervently onto the term, and, this time, it stuck. Having fulfilled his promise, Warner published a book entitled How We Recovered The Ashes. Although the origins of the term are not referred to in the text, the title served (along with the general hype created in Australia) to revive public interest in the legend. The first mention of "The Ashes" in
Wisden Cricketers' Almanack occurs in 1905, while Wisden's first account of the legend is included in the 1922 edition.
