Re: Ashes Cricket Psp Download
Odina Conkright
After England won two of the three Tests on the tour, a small urn was presented to Bligh in Melbourne.[2] The contents of the urn are reputed to be the ashes of a wooden bail, and were humorously described as "the ashes of Australian cricket".[3] It is not clear whether that "tiny silver urn" is the same as the small terracotta urn given to Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) by Bligh's widow after his death in 1927.
Ashes series have usually consisted of five Tests, hosted in turn by England and Australia approximately every two years. The Ashes are regarded as being held by the team that most recently won the series. If the series is drawn, the team that currently holds the Ashes "retains" the trophy.
The first Test match between England and Australia was played in Melbourne, Australia, in 1877, though the Ashes legend started later, after the ninth Test, 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.[5] Australia made a mere 63 runs in their first innings, and England, led by A. N. Hornby, took a 38-run lead with a total of 101. In their second innings, Australia, boosted by a spectacular 55 runs off 60 deliveries 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 the gamesmanship of his opponents, in particular W. G. Grace, 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 eight runs short of victory.
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 on home soil. When it finally sank in, 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 captain for not allowing his partner, Charles Studd (one of the best batsmen in England, having already hit two centuries that season against the colonists), to get the runs. Peate humorously replied, "I had no confidence in Mr Studd, sir, so thought I had better do my best."[6]
The momentous defeat was widely recorded in the British 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:
In the 20 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.[9]
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 20 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 in the 1922 edition.
It took many years before the contests between England and Australia were consistently called "The Ashes", and so there was no concept of either a trophy or a physical representation of the ashes. As late as 1925, the following verse appeared in The Cricketers Annual:
Nevertheless, several attempts had been made to embody the Ashes in a physical memorial. Examples include one presented to Warner in 1904, another to Australian captain M. A. Noble in 1909, and another to Australian captain W. M. Woodfull in 1934.
In August 1926 Ivo Bligh (now Lord Darnley) displayed the Ashes urn at the Morning Post Decorative Art Exhibition held in the Central Hall, Westminster. He made the following statement about how he was given the urn:[12]
When in the autumn the English Eleven went to Australia it was said that they had come to Australia to "fetch" the ashes. England won two out of the three matches played against Murdoch's Australian Eleven, and after the third match some Melbourne ladies put some ashes into a small urn and gave them to me as captain of the English Eleven.
A more detailed account of how the Ashes were given to Ivo Bligh was outlined by his wife, the Countess of Darnley, in 1930 during a speech at a cricket luncheon. Her speech was reported by the Times as follows:[13]
In 1882, she said, it was first spoken of when the Sporting Times, after the Australians had thoroughly beaten the English at the Oval, wrote an obituary in affectionate memory of English cricket "whose demise was deeply lamented and the body would be cremated and taken to Australia". Her husband, then Ivo Bligh, took a team to Australia in the following year. Punch had a poem containing the words "When Ivo comes back with the urn" and when Ivo Bligh wiped out the defeat Lady Clarke, wife of Sir W. J. Clarke, who entertained the English so lavishly, found a little wooden urn, burnt a bail, put the ashes in the urn, and wrapping it in a red velvet bag, put it into her husband's (Ivo Bligh's) hands. He had always regarded it as a great treasure.
There is another statement which is not totally clear made by Lord Darnley in 1921 about the timing of the presentation of the urn. He was interviewed in his home at Cobham Hall by Montague Grover and the report of this interview was as follows:[14]
The proudest possession of Lord Darnley is an earthenware urn containing the ashes which were presented to him by Melbourne residents when he captained the Englishmen in 1882. Though the team did not win, the urn containing the ashes was sent to him just before leaving Melbourne.
The contents of the urn are also problematic; they were variously reported to be the remains of a stump, bail or the outer casing of a ball, but in 1998 Darnley's 82-year-old daughter-in-law said they were the remains of her mother-in-law's veil, casting a further layer of doubt on the matter. However, during the tour of Australia in 2006/7, the MCC official accompanying the urn said the veil legend had been discounted, and it was now "95% certain" that the urn contains the ashes of a cricket bail. Speaking on Channel Nine TV on 25 November 2006, he said x-rays of the urn had shown the pedestal and handles were cracked, and repair work had to be carried out. The urn is made of terracotta and is about 6 inches (150 mm) tall and may originally have been a perfume jar.
In February 1883, just before the disputed Fourth Test, a velvet bag made by Mrs Ann Fletcher, the daughter of Joseph Hines Clarke and Marion Wright, both of Dublin, was given to Bligh to contain the urn. During Darnley's lifetime there was little public knowledge of the urn, and no record of a published photograph exists before 1921. The Illustrated London News published this photo in January 1921 (shown above). When Darnley died in 1927 his widow presented the urn to the Marylebone Cricket Club and that was the key event in establishing the urn as the physical embodiment of the legendary ashes. MCC first displayed the urn in the Long Room at Lord's and since 1953 in the MCC Cricket Museum at the ground. MCC's wish for it to be seen by as wide a range of cricket enthusiasts as possible has led to its being mistaken for an official trophy. It is in fact a private memento, and for this reason it is never awarded to either England or Australia, but is kept permanently in the MCC Cricket Museum where it can be seen together with the specially made red and gold velvet bag and the scorecard of the 1882 match.
Because the urn itself is so delicate, it has been allowed to travel to Australia only twice. The first occasion was in 1988 for a museum tour as part of the Australian Bicentenary celebrations; the second was for the 2006/7 Ashes series.[16] The urn arrived on 17 October 2006, going on display at the Museum of Sydney. It then toured to other states, with the final appearance at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery on 21 January 2007.
In the 1990s, given Australia's long dominance of the Ashes and the popular acceptance of the Darnley urn as "the Ashes", the idea was mooted that the victorious team should be awarded the urn as a trophy and allowed to retain it until the next series. As its condition is fragile and it is a prized exhibit at the MCC Cricket Museum, the MCC would not agree. Furthermore, 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 because it belonged to his family and was given to the MCC only for safe keeping.
England retained the Ashes when it won the 1912 Triangular Tournament, which also featured South Africa. The Australian touring party had been severely weakened by a dispute between the board and players that caused Clem Hill, Victor Trumper, Warwick Armstrong, Tibby Cotter, Sammy Carter and Vernon Ransford to be omitted.[20]
The ruthless and belligerent Armstrong led his team back to England in 1921 where his men lost only two games late in the tour to narrowly miss out of being the first team to complete a tour of England without defeat.
Some of the Australians wanted to use Bodyline in retaliation, but Woodfull flatly refused. He famously told England manager Pelham Warner, "There are two teams out there. One is playing cricket; the other is making no attempt to do so" after the latter had come into the Australian rooms to express sympathy after a Larwood bouncer had struck the Australian skipper in the heart and felled him.[27]
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