The bowling revolutions and the first Tests

Eighteenth-century bowling was rolled or pitched underarm with the hand kept low, and roundarm and overarm each had to fight their way past the MCC over the following century.

Source: ESPNcricinfo, The evolution of bowling · recall

Willes reacted to the no-ball by mounting his horse and leaving, and though his own career ended there the round-arm style he backed kept spreading among Sussex bowlers.

Source: Wikipedia, John Willes (cricketer) · applied

Rather than rule at once, the game staged three Sussex-versus-England trials in 1827 to see whether roundarm made for a fair contest, and the bowlers' success there pushed the MCC toward accepting it.

Source: Wikipedia, Roundarm bowling · applied

The 1828 wording split the difference, permitting the arm to come through at elbow height but no higher, a halfway house that satisfied nobody and lasted only until 1835.

Source: Wikipedia, Roundarm bowling · recall

By 1835 so many bowlers were using roundarm that the MCC gave way and wrote it into the Laws, drawing the line at shoulder height, a limit bowlers soon began to creep above.

Source: ESPNcricinfo, The evolution of bowling · recall

A shoulder-height limit is hard to police in a quick action, and bowlers gained pace and bounce by lifting the arm a little further each season until umpires faced deliveries that were plainly overarm.

Source: ESPNcricinfo, The evolution of bowling · applied

Umpire John Lillywhite called Willsher for six successive no-balls, whereupon the bowler and the other professionals walked off the field, and the stand-off made a rule change unavoidable.

Source: Wikipedia, Overarm bowling · recall

Willsher led the paid men off in a body, the match stopped, and it resumed the next day once the umpire had been changed, a walk-off that showed the professionals' weight in the argument.

Source: Wikipedia, 1862 English cricket season · applied

The 1864 rewrite dropped every height restriction and kept only the demand that the ball be bowled, not thrown or jerked, the same principle that still separates a bowl from a throw.

Source: ESPNcricinfo, The evolution of bowling · recall

A higher arm let the ball be released from nearer the vertical, adding speed, lift and turn, so batting had to answer a far more testing delivery than the low underarm of the game's first century.

Source: ESPNcricinfo, The evolution of bowling · applied

Grace was classed as a Gentleman throughout his career, an amateur who by the rules took no wage, even as he drew more money from cricket than any professional of the day.

Source: Wikipedia, W. G. Grace · recall

Appearance money, inflated expenses and public testimonials brought Grace sums a professional could never match, so his amateur label described his social rank rather than his earnings.

Source: ESPNcricinfo, Wisden on W. G. Grace · applied

Twenty pounds in 1876 was well beyond a professional's match fee, and it was paid to a man the Laws counted as an unpaid amateur, a gap that sums up the era's double standard.

Source: ESPNcricinfo, Wisden on W. G. Grace · recall

A day with Grace in the side could draw twenty to thirty thousand spectators, so a club could raise its prices and still fill the ground, which made him worth far more than any fee at the gate.

Source: Wikipedia, W. G. Grace · applied

W. G., E. M. and Fred Grace all appeared for England in that 1880 Test, the first time three brothers had played together in a Test, and Fred died within a fortnight of it. Pakistan's Hanif, Mushtaq and Sadiq Mohammad repeated the feat in 1969.

Source: Wikipedia, W. G. Grace · recall

Having started in the mid-1860s, Grace went on playing first-class cricket until 1908, a career of more than forty years that reached from the roundarm men's retirement almost to the First World War.

Source: Wikipedia, W. G. Grace · recall

Earlier batsmen tended to be either hitters or blockers, and Grace welded the two, using front and back foot and playing all round the wicket, which set the template for modern batting.

Source: ESPNcricinfo, Wisden on W. G. Grace · applied

Grace qualified in medicine and ran a Bristol practice for around twenty years, fitting his cricket around it, which was part of why he could claim amateur standing while others were paid to play.

Source: Wikipedia, W. G. Grace · recall

More than one national collection was got up for Grace, presented as tributes rather than pay, so large sums changed hands while the fiction of the unpaid amateur stayed intact.

Source: ESPNcricinfo, Wisden on W. G. Grace · applied

Grace turned county and Test cricket into a paying public spectacle drawing huge crowds, which grew the game's money and reach while exposing how little the amateur line had to do with who was actually paid.

Source: Wikipedia, W. G. Grace · applied

England's touring professionals met a Combined Australian XI at Melbourne over four days in March 1877, and the game was later counted as Test number one.

Source: ESPNcricinfo, first Test scorecard 1877 · recall

James Lillywhite had brought out a party of professional cricketers on a commercial tour, with several leading amateurs absent, so the "England" of the first Test was a business venture rather than a chosen best eleven.

Source: Wikipedia, English cricket team in Australia 1876-77 · applied

Australia took the game by 45 runs, and by an odd symmetry the 1977 Centenary Test on the same ground finished with exactly the same margin.

Source: ESPNcricinfo, first Test scorecard 1877 · recall

A century after the first meeting Australia again beat England, and again by 45 runs, a coincidence no one had planned that made the anniversary game famous in its own right.

Source: cricket.com.au, 150 years of Test cricket · applied

Bannerman made 165 out of Australia's 245 before a rising ball broke his finger and forced him to retire, the highest share of a completed Test innings by one batsman that still stands.

Source: Wikipedia, Charles Bannerman · recall

Bannerman took strike to Alfred Shaw's first over and got off the mark, so the first ball bowled and the first run scored in Test cricket both belong to him.

Source: Wikipedia, Charles Bannerman · recall

Nobody in 1877 spoke of a "Test match"; the status was granted by later historians and statisticians who drew a line back through the fixtures to decide which counted.

Source: Guinness World Records, first Test match · applied

England came back to win the return match, so the first meeting of the two countries finished one result each rather than as an Australian clean sweep.

Source: Wikipedia, English cricket team in Australia 1876-77 · recall

Before 1877 international cricket meant odd touring matches against local elevens; the Melbourne game began the run of country-versus-country contests that Test cricket has kept up ever since.

Source: cricket.com.au, 150 years of Test cricket · applied

The 1877 party was a commercial touring team of professionals, so a modern selector would see a side shaped by who would travel for money rather than by who the strongest available players were.

Source: Wikipedia, English cricket team in Australia 1876-77 · applied

Australia's seven-run win on 29 August 1882 was their first over England on English soil, and the shock it caused in the press is what gave rise to the Ashes idea.

Source: Wikipedia, The Ashes · applied

Spofforth took seven wickets in each England innings for match figures of fourteen, and his spell of four for two at the death left England eight runs short.

Source: Wikipedia, The Ashes · recall

Chasing a modest 85, England fell apart against Spofforth and were dismissed for 77, a loss so unexpected that it read in London as a national humiliation.

Source: Wikipedia, The Ashes · applied

On 2 September 1882 The Sporting Times ran a few lines of spoof grief for English cricket, written by Reginald Shirley Brooks, and the phrase it coined stuck.

Source: Wikipedia, The Ashes · recall

The squib ended by saying the body would be cremated and "the ashes taken to Australia," turning a printer's joke into the oldest name in international sport.

Source: Wikipedia, The Ashes · recall

Bligh spoke publicly of going out to "recover those ashes," taking the newspaper joke literally and giving the return series a story that has framed England-Australia cricket ever since.

Source: Wikipedia, The Ashes · applied

England took the three-match series 2-1, so Bligh could claim to have brought the ashes home, which is why the urn he was given is tied to that tour and not to the 1882 defeat.

Source: Wikipedia, The Ashes · recall

Lady Janet Clarke and a party of Melbourne women, among them Florence Morphy, whom Bligh later married, gave him the little urn at Rupertswood, the Clarkes' estate at Sunbury, as a private keepsake said to hold the ash of a burnt bail.

Source: Wikipedia, The Ashes · recall

The urn is a small private memento given to one man, and though it has come to symbolise the contest it has never been awarded to a winning side, staying instead with the MCC.

Source: Wikipedia, The Ashes · applied

Bligh's widow presented the urn to the MCC after his death in 1927, and it has been on show in the club's museum at Lord's ever since, leaving for Australia only three times on loan, in 1988, 2006 and 2019.

Source: Wikipedia, The Ashes · recall

Writers looking back from the 1920s cast the quarter-century before 1914 as a lost idyll of attacking play and fine amateurs, and the label has stuck despite the nostalgia in it.

Source: Wikipedia, Golden age of cricket · recall

Grounds did not cover the pitch, so a shower could turn it into a "sticky" on which the best batsmen might fail, and surviving one raised a batsman's reputation.

Source: Wikipedia, Golden age of cricket · recall

Where others drove and cut, Ranji used wrist and timing to glance balls from outside off stump round to the leg boundary, a stroke thought almost unfair when he began playing it.

Source: Wikipedia, Golden age of cricket · applied

Bosanquet worked out how to turn the ball from the off while using a leg-spinner's action, and the "bosie" or wrong'un he brought into first-class cricket around 1900 is still a stock delivery.

Source: Wikipedia, Bernard Bosanquet (cricketer) · recall

South Africa's bowlers took up the googly quickly and fielded a whole clutch of wrist-spinners around 1905 to 1907, briefly making them a match for England and Australia.

Source: Wikipedia, Golden age of cricket · applied

Jessop reached a hundred in seventy-five minutes against Australia at The Oval in 1902, and more than a century later no England batsman has reached a Test century in fewer minutes.

Source: Wikipedia, Golden age of cricket · applied

MacLaren's 424 against Somerset was the highest individual innings in first-class cricket for over twenty years, a mark of how far batsmen had come to dominate on good pitches.

Source: Wikipedia, Golden age of cricket · applied

A wet English summer, a below-strength Australian party after a players' dispute and a poor South African side made the three-nation experiment a disappointment that was not tried again for many years.

Source: Wikipedia, Golden age of cricket · recall

When war came in August 1914 the county programme was suspended and did not resume until 1919, and enough players were killed that the pre-war game never quite returned.

Source: Playing Pasts, Cricket in 1914 · applied

The nostalgic view skips over gate receipts, players scraping a living, the shamateur payments around men like Grace and sharp national rivalry, none of which fit the image of carefree play.

Source: Wikipedia, Golden age of cricket · applied