 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
The Ashes 2006/07: australia |
 |
The Ashes 2006/07About The Ashes I The Urn I History I The Venues: MCG & SCG About the Ashes:
Ashes series have generally been played over five Test matches, although there have been four match series (1938; 1975) and six match series (1970-71; 1974-75; 1978-79; 1981; 1985; 1989; 1993 and 1997). 293 matches have been played, with Australia winning 115 times, England 92 times, and 86 draws. Australians have made 264 centuries in Ashes Tests, twenty-three of them over 200, while Englishmen have scored 212 centuries, of which ten have been scores over 200. On 41 occasions, individual Australians have taken ten wickets in a match. Englishmen have performed that feat 38 times.
The Urn:
A poem was presented to Bligh with the urn and appears on it: When Ivo goes back with the urn, the urn; The Ashes urn itself is never physically awarded to either England or Australia, but is kept permanently in the MCC Cricket Museum at Lord's Cricket Ground, where it can be seen together with a specially-made red and gold velvet bag and the scorecard of the 1882 match.
To avoid the transportation involved, the MCC instead began commissioning a larger-scale replica trophy in Waterford Crystal to award to the winning team of each series.
History:
By 1882 the tradition of England-Australia cricket tours was well established, with a total of eight Tests having been played, five of them at the MCG, two at the Sydney Cricket Ground and one at The Oval in London. Then, in 1882, England lost to a visiting Australian team in England for the first time. The match was played at The Oval in August in what was said to be a difficult pitch. Australian bowler Fred Spofforth decimated the English batting after a shocking start by the Australians and the result was a nailbiting finish in which Australia won by seven runs — still one of the closest finishes in Test cricket history. The defeat was widely recorded in the English press and a mock obituary was published in The Sporting Times, lamenting the death of English cricket and noted that "the body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia".
Two further matches were played by the tourists in Sydney, with the first being won by England and the second by Australia. The second Sydney match was subsequently deemed to not be of Test status, so England had won with the series and had "recovered The Ashes" as Bligh had set out to do. A group of Melbourne women presented Bligh with a small urn and the Ashes tradition was then firmly established. Notable Ashes series took place in 1932-33 (the Bodyline tour), 1948 (Sir Donald Bradman's "Invincibles" Australian side), 1981 (in which an England team spearheaded by Ian Botham won a thrilling series), and 2005 (when England eventually won the Ashes back, after a 'drought' of 16 years).
About the Venues:MCG:
Internationally, the MCG is remembered as the centrepiece stadium of the 1956 Summer Olympics and the 2006 Commonwealth Games. The open-air stadium is also one of the world's most famous cricket venues, with the well-attended Boxing Day test match held there every year, starting on Boxing Day. Throughout the winter, it serves as the home of Australian Rules Football, with at least one game held there every week (usually more), and in late September the Grand Final fills the stadium to capacity. Until the 1970s, more than 120,000 people were occasionally crammed into the venue - the record crowd standing at around 130,000 for a Billy Graham religious event in 1959, closely followed by 121,696 for the 1970 VFL Grand Final. Regulations now limit the maximum capacity to approximately 99,000.
|
|
The series is named after a satirical obituary published in The Sporting Times in 1882 following the match at The Oval, in which Australia beat England in England 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 dubbed the next English tour to Australia as the quest to regain The Ashes. A small terracotta urn was presented to the England captain Ivo Bligh by a group of Melbourne women after England's victory in the Test series. The urn is reputed to contain a set of burnt bails symbolising "the ashes of English cricket". While the urn has come to symbolise the Ashes series, the name The Ashes predates the existence of the urn. The urn is not used as a trophy for the Ashes series, and whichever side "holds" the Ashes, the urn remains in the MCC Museum at Lord's. Since the 1998-99 Ashes series, a Waterford crystal trophy has been presented to the winners.
The Ashes is one of the most fiercely contested competitions in cricket today, rivalling the intensity of the other great international cricket rivalry between India and Pakistan. The failure of England to regain the Ashes for 16 years from 1989, coupled with the global dominance of the Australian team, had dulled the lustre of the series in recent years. But the close results in the 2005 Ashes series, and the overall high quality and competitiveness of the cricket, have boosted the popularity of the sport in Britain and considerably enhanced the profile of the Ashes around the world. Whilst the tension of the matches has caused an occasional angry moment, the matches were generally played with good spirit, and sportsmanship of the players of both sides has been high, with commentators often highlighting Andrew Flintoff consoling Brett Lee at the end of the second Test as epitomising this. In interviews following the final match, players from both sides were quick to congratulate their opponents, both the individual players and the team as a whole.
A team must win a series to gain the right to hold the Ashes. A drawn series results in the previous holders retaining the Ashes. To date, a total of 62 Ashes series have been played with Australia winning 30, England winning 27. The remaining five series were drawn, with Australia retaining the Ashes four times and England retaining it once.
After the third game of the 1882-83 tour, the English team, led by Ivo Bligh were guests of Sir William Clarke, at his property "Rupertswood" at Sunbury, Victoria. A group of Victorian ladies headed by Lady Clarke burned what has variously been called a ball, bail or veil [1], and presented the resulting ashes to Bligh in an urn together with a velvet bag, which was made by Mrs Ann Fletcher, the daughter of Joseph Hines Clarke and Marion Wright, both of Dublin. She said, "What better way than to actually present the English captain with the very 'object' — albeit mythical — he had come to Australia to retrieve?" Bligh later married another of these Melburnian ladies, Florence Morphy. When he died in 1927, his widow presented the urn to the Marylebone Cricket Club. The urn itself is made of terracotta and is about four inches (10 cm) tall.
The urn has been back to Australia once, in 1988 for a museum tour as part of Australia's Bicentennial celebrations. Despite the fragile state of the urn, it is planned that the urn will tour Australia again in 2006-7. In the 1990s, given Australia's long dominance of the Ashes series, the idea was mooted that the victorious team in an Ashes series should be awarded the urn as a trophy and allowed to retain it until the next series. 
The first cricket match deemed to be a Test was played at the MCG between Australia and England commencing on March 15, 1877 and was won by Australia by 45 runs.
Later that year, the Honourable Ivo Bligh led a team of eight amateurs and four professionals to Australia to recover them, with the first two matches of the tour played at the MCG. The first being a timeless match (as was the custom in those days) that commenced on December 30. On New Year's Day the attendance was 23,000, and Australia won the match by nine wickets in three days. The second match commenced on January 19, 1883 and was won comfortably by England by an innings and 27 runs.
The Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) is an iconic Australian sporting venue located in Yarra Park in inner Melbourne, home to the Melbourne Cricket Club. It holds the world record for the highest light towers. The MCG is an easy walk from the city centre, and is serviced by Richmond and Jolimont train stations.
The MCG, often referred to as "The G", has also hosted other events, from International Rules between the Australian Football League and Gaelic Athletic Association, to international rugby, football (soccer) World Cup qualifiers and even rock concerts. During the lunch break at the 2005 Boxing Day Cricket Test, it was announced by Australian Federal Treasurer, Peter Costello, that the MCG would be added to the Australian Heritage Register.
In its earlier incarnations, the pitches were favourable for batting, resulting in mammoth scores. The highest of these was compiled in 1929-30 season, when Sir Donald Bradman made his celebrated personal best of 452 for New South Wales in a match against Queensland. From the early 1970s though, the square's character has undergone a number of revisions. Principally, it has come to be seen as a spinner's paradise - never more clearly than in memorable Australian Test wins over West Indies in 1984-85 (when Bob Holland and Murray Bennett piloted the home team to a crushing success) and in 1988-89 (when the left arm orthodox spin of Allan Border claimed an unlikely 11 scalps). Of course, this is not to say that the limelight has been stolen purely by slow bowlers; West Indian Brian Lara's masterful 277 in 1992-93 and paceman Fanie De Villiers' match haul of 10 for 123 at the forefront of South Africa's amazing five run win in 1993-94 underlining the point. |