What does the ‘Ashes’ refer to in cricket?

What does the ‘Ashes’ refer to in cricket?

The Ashes is a Test cricket series, played between England and Australia. It is international cricket’s oldest, and most celebrated rivalry, dating back to 1882. It is currently played biennially, alternately in England and Australia. However since cricket is a summer game, and the venues being in opposite hemispheres means the break between series is alternately 18 months and 30 months. If a series is drawn, then the country holding the Ashes retains them. The series is named dafter a satirical published in an English news paper, ‘The Sporting Times’, in 1882, after the match at the Oval in which australia beat England on an English ground 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 then dubbed the next English tour to Australia in 1882-83 as ‘the quest to regain The Ashes’. During that tour in Australia, a small terracotta urn was presented as a gift to the England captain Ivo Bligh by a group of Melbourne women. The contents of the urn are reputed to be the ashes of an item of cricket equipment! Victorious teams often hold aloft replicas of the urn as a symbol of their triumph in an Ashes series but the actual urn has never been presented or displayed as a trophy in this way, whichever side holds the Ashes, the urn normally remains in the Marylebone Cricket club Museum at Lord’s


Since the 1998-99 Ashes series a Waterford crystal representation of the Ashes urn has been presented to the winners of the Ashes series as the official trophy of that series.