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The Ashes is a biennial Test cricket contest played between England and Australia. The Ashes is one of cricket's fiercest and most celebrated rivalries. The 2005 Ashes series was played in England, and was won by England. The next Ashes series will be in Australia in 2006/2007; the next series in England will be in 2009.

The series is named after a satirical obituary published in The Sporting Times in 1882 following the match at The Oval in which Australia beat England in England 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 dubbed the next English tour to Australia as the quest to regain The Ashes. A small terracotta urn was presented to the England captain Ivo Bligh by a group of Melbourne women after England's victory in the Test series. The urn is reputed to contain a set of burnt bails symbolising "the ashes of English cricket". While the urn has come to symbolise the Ashes series, the name The Ashes predates the existence of the urn. The urn is not used as the trophy for the Ashes series, and whichever side "holds" the Ashes, the urn remains in the MCC Museum at Lord's. Since the 1998/99 Ashes series, a Waterford crystal trophy has been presented to the winners.

Notable Ashes series took place in 1932/33 (the Bodyline tour), 1948 (Sir Donald Bradman's "Invincibles" Australian side), 1981 (in which an England team spearheaded by Ian Botham won a thrilling series), and 2005 (when England won the Ashes for the first time in 18 years in a very evenly-matched Ashes series).

The obituary

The first Test match between England and Australia had been played in 1877, but the Ashes legend dates back only to their ninth Test match, played in 1882.

On the 1882 tour, the Australians played only one Test, at The Oval in London. It was a low-scoring game on a difficult pitch. Australia made only 63 runs in their first innings, and England, led by Monkey Hornby, took a 38-run lead with a total of 101. In the second innings, Australia made 122, leaving England to score only 85 runs to win. Australian bowler Fred Spofforth refused to give in, declaring, "This thing can be done". He devastated the English batting, taking the final four wickets while conceding only two runs, to leave England a mere seven runs short of victory in one of the closest and most nail-biting finishes in cricket history.

When England's last batsman went in the team needed only 10 runs to win, but the final batsman Peate scored only 2 before being bowled by Boyle. The astonished crowd fell silent, not believing that England could possibly have lost by 7 runs. When what had happened had sunk in, the crowd cheered the Australians.

When Peate returned to the Pavilion he was reprimanded by WG Grace for not allowing his partner at the wicket Charles Studd to get the runs. Despite Studd being one of the best batsman in England Peate replied, "I had no confidence in Mr Studd, sir, so thought I had better do my best."

The defeat was widely recorded in the English press. The most notable report was a mock obituary, written by Reginald Shirley Brooks, printed in The Sporting Times on the following Saturday, September 2. The obituary 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."

The English media played up the subsequent tour to Australia in 1882/83 (which had been arranged before this defeat) as a quest to "regain the Ashes".

The Ashes urn

After the third game of the 1882/83 tour, the English team, led by Ivo Bligh were guests of Sir William Clarke, at his property "Rupertswood" at Sunbury, Victoria. A group of Victorian ladies headed by Lady Clarke burned what has variously been called a ball, bail or veil , and presented the resulting ashes to Bligh in an urn together with a velvet bag, which was made by Mrs Ann Fletcher, the daughter of Joseph Hines Clarke and Marion Wright, both of Dublin. She said, "What better way than to actually present the English captain with the very 'object' — albeit mythical — he had come to Australia to retrieve?" Bligh later married another of these Melbournian ladies, Florence Morphy. When he died in 1927, his widow presented the urn to the Marylebone Cricket Club. The urn itself is made of terracotta and is about four inches (10 cm) tall.

A poem was presented to Bligh with the urn and appears on it :

When Ivo goes back with the urn, the urn;

Studds, Steel, Read and Tylecote return, return;

The welkin will ring loud,

The great crowd will feel proud,

Seeing Barlow and Bates with the urn, the urn;

And the rest coming home with the urn.

The Ashes urn itself is never physically awarded to either England or Australia, but is kept permanently in the MCC Cricket Museum at Lord's Cricket Ground, where it can be seen together with a specially-made red and gold velvet bag and the scorecard of the 1882 match.

The urn has been back to Australia once, in 1988 for a museum tour as part of Australia's Bicentennial celebrations. In the 1990s, given Australia's long dominance of the Ashes series, the idea was mooted (mostly by Australians) that the victorious team in an Ashes series should be awarded the urn as a trophy and allowed to retain it until the next series. Instead the MCC commissioned a Waterford Crystal larger-scale replica trophy which is now awarded to the winning team.

In 2002, Bligh's great-great-grandson (Lord Clifton, the heir-apparent to the Earldom of Darnley) argued that the Ashes urn should not be returned to Australia as it was essentially the property of his family and only given to the MCC for safe-keeping.

Summary of results and statistics

A team must win a series to gain the right to hold the Ashes trophy. A drawn series results in the previous holders retaining the trophy. To date, a total of 62 Ashes series have been played with Australia winning 30, England winning 27. The remaining five series were drawn, with Australia retaining the Ashes four times and England retaining it once.

Ashes series have generally been played over five Test matches, although there have been four match series (1938; 1975) and six match series (1970-71; 1974-75; 1978-79; 1981; 1985; 1989; 1993 and 1997). 293 matches have been played, with Australia winning 115 times, England 92 times, and 86 draws. Australians have made 264 centuries in Ashes Tests, twenty-three of them over 200, while Englishmen have scored 212 centuries, of which ten have been scores over 200. On 41 occasions, individual Australians have taken ten wickets in a match. Englishmen have performed that feat 38 times.

The Ashes today

The Ashes is one of the most fiercely contested competitions in cricket today, rivalling the intensity of the other great international cricket rivalry between India and Pakistan . The failure of England to regain the Ashes for 16 years from 1989, coupled with the global dominance of an almost invincible Australian team, had dulled the lustre of the series in recent years. But the close results in the 2005 Ashes series, and the overall high quality and competitiveness of the cricket, have boosted the popularity of the sport in Britain and considerably enhanced the profile of the Ashes around the world. Whilst the tension of the matches has caused an occasional angry moment, the matches were generally played with good spirit, and sportsmanship of the players of both sides has been high, with commentators often highlighting Andrew Flintoff consoling Brett Lee at the end of the second Test as epitomising this. In interviews following the final match, players from both sides were quick to congratulate their opponents, both the individual players and the team as a whole.

Match venues

The series alternate between England and Australia, and within each country each of the (usually) five matches is held at a different cricket ground.

In Australia, the grounds currently used are the Melbourne Cricket Ground (first staged an England-Australia Test in the 1876–77 season), the Sydney Cricket Ground (1881–82), Adelaide Oval (1884–85), The Gabba (1932–33) and The WACA, Perth (1970–71). One Test was held at the Brisbane Exhibition Ground in 1928–29.

In England the grounds used are The Oval (since 1880), Old Trafford (1884), Lord's (1884), Trent Bridge (1899), Headingley Stadium (1899) and Edgbaston Stadium (1902). One Test was held at Bramall Lane, Sheffield in 1902.

The Ashes outside cricket

The popularity and reputation of the cricket series has led to many other events taking the name for England against Australia contests. The best-known and longest-running of these events is the rugby league contest between Great Britain and Australia (see Rugby League Ashes). The contest first started in 1908, the name being suggested by the touring Australians. Another example is in the British television show Gladiators, where two series were based around the Australia–England contest.

The trophy also features in the science-fiction comedy novel Life, the Universe and Everything by Douglas Adams. Robots steal the urn because it contains the ashes of the Wooden Pillar of Nature and Spirituality, one of the components necessary to unlock the device imprisoning the inhabitants of the planet Krikkit whose ambition is to unleash death and destruction on the galaxy. The idea is that the English subconsciously remember the Krikkit war, when robots armed with flat bats and red exploding balls attempted to eradicate the universe, and that the game of Cricket is humanity's perverse cultural memory of the incident.

In the cinema, the Ashes featured in the film The Final Test, released in 1953, based on a television play by Terence Rattigan. It stars Jack Warner as an England cricketer playing the last Test of his career, which is the last of an Ashes series; the film contains cameo appearances from prominent contemporary Ashes cricketers including Jim Laker and Denis Compton.

See also

• History of Test cricket (to 1883)
• History of Test cricket (1884 to 1889)
• History of Test cricket (1890 to 1900)
• Portal:Cricket — for more coverage of all things Cricket.

Notes

1. In 1998, Lord Darnley’s 82-year-old daughter-in-law said they were the remains of her mother-in-law’s veil, not a bail. Other evidence suggests a ball. The certain origin of the ashes, therefore, is the subject of some dispute.
2. Ashes — The Beginning, 334 Not out

References

• Wisden's Cricketers Almanack (various editions)
• How We Recovered The Ashes — An Account of the 1903-04 M.C.C. Tour of Australia by P. F. Warner ISBN 0-413-77399-X
• The Cricket Captains of England by Alan Gibson ISBN 1-85145-395-4
• Wisden Anthology 1864–1900 edited by Benny Green ISBN 0-356-10732-9
• Australia versus England, A Pictorial History of every Test Match since 1877 ISBN 0-670-90323-X
• Lords 1787-1945 by Sir Pelham Warner ISBN 1-85145-112-9
• A Social History of English Cricket by Derek Birley ISBN 1-85410-941-3
• Test Cricket Records compiled by James Gibb ISBN 0-00411-690-9
• The Complete History of Cricket Tours at Home & Abroad by Peter Wynne Thomas
• Joy Munns, Beyond Reasonable Doubt: The Birthplace of the Ashes, Sunbury, 1994, ISBN 0-646-22153-1, for the origin of the Ashes
• Cricinfo
• Cricket Archive
• Six Curiosities from the MCC Museum, by Ricky Ponting in the Telegraph
• A History of the Great Britain Rugby League Team

External links

• Ashes Series, A Legend is Born
• The Ashes Tray

• The Ashes