10 Amazing Facts About Ashes That You Really Wanted To Know

IF you’re bleary-eyed reading this it probably means you’ve been up all night watching the Ashes, and as a diehard fan you’ll probably know everything about the England v Australia cricket series.

Our topic of the day is more for the casual observers or those people who just have to have some random bits of trivia at their disposal for when the right time comes to share.

For you we present 10 facts about The Ashes series you might not know

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• The ‘ashes’ being fought over between England and Australia cricketers Down Under is actually an urn which is on display at the MCC Museum at Lord's.
• It dates back to 1882 when England lost to the Aussies on home soil for the first time and a newspaper made a quip about how the body of English cricket would be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia. For the next series a short time later England’s captain Ivo Bligh pledged to regain those ashes.
• After a successful tour a group of women presented Bligh with a small terracotta urn said to represent those ashes. It’s not known what’s inside the urn, though it’s generally considered to be the ashes from a wooden bail.
• The urn lived on the mantelpiece at the Bligh family home in Kent for 43 years until Bligh’s death, after which his widow bequeathed it to the Marylebone Cricket Club.
• Replicas of the original urn are sometimes held aloft by victorious Ashes captains but since the late 1990s the official trophy has been a Waterford Crystal trophy shaped like an urn.
• The England v Australia Test match series has been referred to as The Ashes since 1905 after England’s winning captain of the 1903-04 series write a book called How We Recovered The Ashes.
• Before the start of the current series, Australia had won 123 of the Test matches, with England behind on 103. However, each country has won the Ashes series 31 times, with five drawn series.
• There have only ever been two Ashes whitewashes where one team has won all the Tests in a series – and both of them have been achieved by the Aussies, in 1920–21 and 2006–07. England won 5-1 in 1978–79, our largest winning margin to date.
• Pre-dating the Ashes, Australia v England in March 1877 is considered to have been the first official Test match – ending with Australia winning by 45 runs. Bizarrely, in the centenary match to mark this occasion Australia beat England again by 45 runs.
• Australian were bowled out by England for just 36 in 1902 – a feat our bowlers can only dream of repeating this time around!