The Ashes Fifth Test

The Ashes is a cricket game, or series as they say, that is played twice a year between England and Australia.
The story of the series comes from an 1882 game played in England. England had been clobbering Australia for several years before and was favored to win again, but through superb cricketering (I hope that word makes since and I didn’t just make it up) and quite a bit of luck Australia defeated England by only seven points, which is not very many for a cricket series I have discovered. There was mass hysteria over the Australian victory and many jokes and comics were developed about the English failing. The most famous of these was a satirical obituary that came out in The Sporting Times, which read:

“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 team was provoked by these jokes and the captain, Ivo Bligh, promised that on the next tour to Australia in 1882–83 he would regain "the ashes". England did prevail in the next series, beating the Australians 2 games to 1. After the series captain Bligh was awarded an urn from a woman's group in Melbourne, which he returned home with to England. The urn is rumored to hold the ashes of a cricket bail (a piece of wood that helps determine if the three vertical sticks are broken meaning the batter is bowled out).
Since 1882 the teams have continued to meet biennially to play in “The Ashes” series, and although it is not recognized by the cricket confederation the winner is typically given an urn replica of the original given to captain Bligh. The original is on display in the Marylebone Cricket Club Museum at Lord’s in England.

I knew nothing of this history when I sat down at the Central Station Park in Sydney yesterday. All I knew was that there was a huge TV screen in the park and that there was a guy giving away prizes.

What I had stumbled into was the Vodafone Ashes live site where cricket fans, that could not get tickets to the game in the Sydney Cricket Grounds, could watch their country compete while resting in the park. I arrived just as the cricket players were finishing up their luncheon break, cricket is the only game that has breaks for meals, and so I was in for the first cricket game experience of my life.

Cricket is a much more interesting game than many US people would think. First off they have very strange terminology like Wicket that makes it very difficult for us to get a grasp on. Secondly the commentators speak about cricket in the strangest ways. Just today I read this sentence out of the Sydney morning herald, “…and Paul Collingwood was not required to move a leg muscle at third slip to take the red prize...”, followed very quickly by, “…Shane Watson led the scoring but should have reached another half century, most of all for his patience in the morning session when he scored 19 without a boundary”. If either of those two things doesn’t make you interested in learning more about cricket, than maybe the fact that the longest cricket match ever played lasted 105 hours, 1 minute and 14 seconds will make you want to head on over to Wikipedia and do some digging.

My lack of cricket knowledge didn’t stop me from enjoying Usman Khawaja and, what the Sydney Morning Herald tells me, are his “hallmarks of batting greatness” out there on the pitch. I even got a chance to catch a cricket ball that was shot out of a pitching machine by a bunch of twenty something Coke-a-Cola reps.

Who took a picture of me diving to the side and photoshopped it onto the cricket grounds. It was quite a fun experience I would have to say and it really makes me want to learn a little something about cricket so that next time maybe I can go into town and sit down in a pub, drink a beer…or twenty watch the match and comment to my neighbor how “Michael Hussey was lucky that an early edge died before reaching the cordon” (again a quote from the Sydney Morning Herald).