The history of the Ashes, from mock obituary to modern urn

Cricket's oldest rivalry is contested for a trophy that would fit inside a coat pocket. The urn is a small terracotta object, barely taller than a coffee cup, and it has never been handed to a winning captain in the middle of a ground. It sits in a display case at Lord's and stays there whoever wins. The teams play for it regardless, and have done for well over a century. That gap between the size of the prize and the weight of the contest is the whole point of the Ashes.

England and Australia had already been playing each other for five years before the urn existed. The match now recognised as the first Test was staged in Melbourne in March 1877, an experiment in giving a touring side a fixture against a full-strength local eleven rather than the odds matches that had been common until then. What followed was a series of tours in both directions, arranged privately, played under varying conditions, and reported at length in newspapers that had begun to understand how much appetite there was for the results. The rivalry existed. It simply did not yet have a name.

A defeat, and the joke that outlived everyone in it

The name arrived in the late summer of 1882, at The Oval. Australia, touring England, played a single Test against a strong home side. The pitch was difficult, the scoring low, and the match turned into an attritional chase that England were expected to complete. They did not. Fred Spofforth, the fast bowler Australians called the Demon, ran through the lower order in a spell that has never quite left the folklore, and Australia won a low-scoring match by a handful of runs. It was the first time Australia had beaten England in a Test on English soil.

The reaction was theatrical rather than analytical. Several papers wrote about the defeat in terms of national embarrassment. One of them, The Sporting Times, ran a short satirical notice in the style of a death announcement. It is usually attributed to Reginald Shirley Brooks, and it read, in substance:

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.

It was a joke in a weekly paper. It should have been forgotten within a month. Instead it gave the fixture a metaphor that was flexible enough to survive every change in how the game was organised, and specific enough to be repeated without explanation. Nothing else in cricket has that. Every other trophy has to explain itself.

The voyage that created the urn

That winter, the Honourable Ivo Bligh took an England side to Australia. Bligh, later the eighth Earl of Darnley, made a point of the newspaper joke before the team sailed, saying his purpose was to recover the ashes. The tour was reported in the same register. England won the series that had been scheduled, and somewhere in that Australian summer a group of Melbourne women presented Bligh with a small terracotta urn.

The details of the presentation are genuinely uncertain, and honest accounts of the Ashes say so. The urn was probably given at a private house rather than at a ground. Florence Morphy, who married Bligh not long afterwards, is closely associated with the gift. What was burnt to make the ashes inside has been argued over ever since. The most repeated version is that it was a bail. Another account, from within the family, holds that it was the remains of a veil. There is no way now to settle it, and the argument has become part of the object's appeal rather than a problem with it.

Bligh kept the urn as a personal souvenir for the rest of his life. It was not a trophy in any formal sense, and no one competed for it. After his death in the 1920s his widow presented it to MCC, and it went into the museum at Lord's, which is where it has essentially remained. The term itself took longer to become official than the object did. For two decades the Ashes was journalists' shorthand, revived at the start of each series, and it only hardened into the standard name for the contest in the early years of the twentieth century.

What the urn actually is, and what is handed over

The urn is fragile, unrepresentative and privately donated, and it is not the thing a winning captain lifts. Since the late 1990s the presentation object has been a crystal replica, which travels, is sprayed with champagne and gets held above the head in the usual way. The original has left England only on a small number of occasions, always for display, never as a prize.

That produces one of the rivalry's genuine oddities. The urn is not won. It is held. If a series is drawn, the side that already holds the Ashes retains them, and there is no mechanism for a shared title in the ordinary sense. A team defending the Ashes therefore needs only parity across five matches, which changes how the final Test of a level series is played and gives the touring side, in particular, a very different set of calculations to make. Most rivalries reset every meeting. This one carries a state forward.

What makes the rivalry distinct

Several things separate the Ashes from cricket's other long-running fixtures.

The first is continuity. The series has been contested, with interruptions for two world wars, on a rhythm of roughly every two years since the 1880s. Each country hosts about every four years. A player with a long career might see three home series and three away, and a supporter can measure out a life in them. Very little in professional sport has that kind of metronome.

The second is length. Five Tests is now unusual. Most bilateral Test series are two or three matches, squeezed between white-ball commitments, and a team can lose one and still recover the series with a single good week. Five Tests is long enough for form to turn over, for selection errors to be exposed and corrected, and for a genuine narrative to develop rather than a single decisive session. It also punishes squads without depth, because five Tests in six or seven weeks will find the limits of a fast bowling attack.

The third is that there is no neutral ground. The Ashes is played only in England or Australia, never at a third venue, and the two sets of conditions are about as different as Test cricket offers. That makes home advantage structural rather than incidental.

The fourth is the surrounding apparatus. The fixed points of an Australian summer, the Boxing Day Test in Melbourne and the New Year Test in Sydney, are national occasions in a way that few sporting dates anywhere are. English grounds have their own rituals, their own regulars and a travelling support that has become part of the broadcast. None of this is invented for the occasion. It accumulated.

Home conditions, and why they decide so much

The most useful thing a newcomer can understand about the Ashes is that the two countries do not play the same game.

In England, the match ball is a Dukes, hand stitched, with a pronounced seam that stands proud of the surface and stays hard for longer than its Australian counterpart. Combine that with cloud cover, cooler air and pitches that often retain moisture, and you get a game where the ball moves both in the air and off the surface for long periods. Totals are lower. Collapses are common and are not necessarily evidence of bad batting. Bowlers who hit a full length and let the ball do the work prosper, and the ability to bat through a difficult hour is worth more than the ability to score quickly.

In Australia, the ball is a Kookaburra, machine stitched, with a seam that flattens after the first twenty five to thirty overs. Sideways movement is available early and then largely disappears until the ball is old enough to reverse. Pitches are traditionally harder and bouncier, particularly in Perth and Brisbane. The square boundaries at Melbourne and Adelaide are large, the outfields fast, and the days long and hot. Bowlers who succeed in England by pitching the ball up often find that the same length in Australia is comfortably driven, and have to learn to bowl a little shorter without becoming ineffective. Batters used to playing the moving ball late must adjust to bounce that arrives higher and quicker.

Australia also stage a day-night Test with a pink ball, usually at Adelaide, and have been notably strong in that format. The pink ball behaves differently under lights, particularly in the twilight period, and a touring side that has played little pink-ball cricket is being asked to learn a variant of the game in the middle of a series.

Layer on the practical difficulties. Touring squads now arrive with fewer warm-up matches than any previous generation, because the calendar has been compressed by white-ball cricket. A visiting batter may face first-class bowling in Australian conditions for the first time in the opening session of the first Test. Acclimatisation, once built into a tour that lasted months, is now something teams try to buy in a fortnight.

The result is the pattern that has defined the modern era. Since the mid 2000s, home sides have won the great majority of Ashes series, often comfortably, and away wins have become the exception rather than the expectation. When England won in Australia at the start of the 2010s it was their first series victory there since the mid 1980s, and it remains the clearest recent example of a touring side solving the problem rather than surviving it.

Bodyline, and the limits of the rivalry

The rivalry has produced one episode that went beyond sport. On the 1932-33 tour, England, captained by Douglas Jardine, adopted a tactic of fast, short-pitched bowling aimed at the batter's body with a packed leg-side field. Harold Larwood was the principal bowler. The strategy was designed largely to restrict Don Bradman, whose scoring in the previous series had been so far beyond normal that conventional plans had failed.

It worked, and it caused a diplomatic incident. Cricket Australia's predecessor cabled MCC in terms that questioned English sportsmanship, MCC replied in terms that questioned Australian manners, and governments became involved. The laws were subsequently changed to limit leg-side fielders and to give umpires power over persistent short-pitched bowling. Bodyline is remembered partly as a story about ruthlessness and partly as proof that this fixture has always been able to generate more heat than the two boards can comfortably manage.

The pattern of dominant eras

Read across the whole history and the Ashes does not alternate evenly. It moves in blocks, and each block usually has a structural explanation rather than a mystical one.

The pre-war decades belonged to whichever side had the better fast bowling and, in the 1930s, to Bradman. His run-scoring across the 1930s distorted the contest to the point where England's response was the one described above, and after the war he returned to lead a touring side that went through an English summer without losing a match. That team's dominance was not simply about one batter, but he was the reason opposing captains ran out of ideas.

England's answer came in the 1950s, built on a pace attack of genuine hostility and on spin bowling that could exploit uncovered pitches. That period produced one of the most extraordinary individual performances in the game's history, when a single England off-spinner took nineteen of the twenty available wickets in a Test at Old Trafford.

The 1970s swung back. Australia found two fast bowlers who operated as a pair rather than as individuals, and touring England sides had no comparable answer. The end of that decade and the early 1980s were disrupted by the split over World Series Cricket, which pulled leading players out of the official game for two seasons and left both teams selecting from reduced pools.

The 1981 series in England is the outlier that everyone remembers. England, having lost early and changed captain, won a Test at Headingley after following on, in a match so far gone that the bookmakers had posted long odds against them, and then won again at Edgbaston and Old Trafford. It was one player, Ian Botham, taking a series away from the other side almost single-handedly, supported by a spell of fast bowling from Bob Willis that has its own afterlife.

Then came the longest block of all. From the late 1980s to the middle of the following decade, Australia did not lose an Ashes series. They built a side with a great leg-spinner, an accurate and relentless seam attack, an opening pair who put pressure on the fielding side from the first over, and a middle order that scored quickly enough to give bowlers time. England changed captains and selection policy repeatedly during those years without ever assembling a comparable balance.

2005 broke it. England finally produced four fast bowlers who could operate as a unit, added reverse swing to their repertoire, and won a five-Test series that is still the reference point for how good this fixture can be, including a Test at Edgbaston decided by the narrowest winning margin in Ashes history. The reversal was immediate. Australia won every match of the return series in 2006-07, then repeated the whitewash in 2013-14 behind a single fast bowler bowling at extreme pace. England won at home in between, and again later in the decade, and the 2019 series was drawn after Ben Stokes played an innings at Headingley that belongs in the same paragraph as Botham's.

The women's Ashes

The women's Ashes has been contested since the late 1990s and, since 2013, on a multi-format basis. A single Test, a set of one-day internationals and a set of Twenty20 internationals are played, points are allocated across all of them, and the Test carries the greatest weight of any individual match. It is the most interesting scoring system in international cricket, because it requires a squad to be genuinely good at all three formats rather than specialising, and because a side can lose the Test and still win the Ashes by dominating the white-ball legs.

It has also grown fast. Both boards now schedule it as a headline property rather than an addendum, crowds have risen sharply, and the standard of the cricket has moved on considerably since full professionalism arrived in both countries.

Why it still carries weight

The argument that the Ashes is an anachronism has been made regularly for thirty years, and it has not held up. Several things sustain it.

Test cricket has become scarcer for most nations, and the Ashes is one of the few series that both boards protect absolutely. Whatever else is squeezed by the franchise calendar, the window for a five-Test Ashes is defended by the two boards with the most commercial leverage in the game.

The World Test Championship has also given the series a second layer of consequence. Ashes results now feed a two-year league table, which means a whitewash or a heavy defeat is not just a summer's disappointment but a mathematical problem for the following eighteen months.

The rivalry also benefits from its own archive. Because it has been played continuously for so long, and because the conditions in each country have remained recognisably distinct, a current series can be read against every previous one. A collapse at Headingley or a fast bowler running in at Perth carries a set of references that a new tournament cannot manufacture. That is what the newspaper joke of 1882 accidentally created, and why an urn nobody wins is still the thing both sides say they are playing for.

If you want to follow it properly, watch the conditions before the team sheets. Look at the ball being used, the cloud, the amount of grass left on the surface and the size of the square boundaries, and you will usually be able to predict what kind of match it will be before a wicket falls. The player records will tell you who is in form. The ground will tell you whether that form is going to matter.