What is ashes Series?

Question

Played between Australia & England

Answer 1

The Ashes Cricket Series. Australia and England Ashes cricket teams, compete bi-annually for a trophy known as The Ashes.

History:
In 1882, a confident English team was beaten on their home turf by the Australian underdogs, who came from an almost unwinnable position to triumph and disgrace their opponents.

A British newspaper, the Sporting Times printed an obituary to cricket which read.

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
NB: The body will be cremated, and the ashes taken to Australia.

So.... there was the origin of "The Ashes".

The actual "Ashes" are the remains of either an incinerated stump or bale (no-one is sure which) kept in a velvet bag.

Read more here
http://www.abcofcricket.com/A_Legend_Is_Born/a_legend_is_born.htm
and
http://www.334notout.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ashes

Answer 2

The Ashes is a Test cricket contest played between England and Australia - it is cricket's most celebrated rivalry and the oldest in international cricket dating back to 1882. It is currently played at approximately two yearly intervals, alternately in England and Australia. The Ashes are "held" by the country which last won a series and to "regain" them the other country must win more Test matches in a series than the country that "holds" them. If a series is "drawn" then the country holding the Ashes retains them. The last Ashes series was played in England in 2005 when England regained The Ashes after a gap of 16 years by winning the series 2-1. The next Ashes series will be in Australia in 2006-07 and the next series in England will be in 2009.

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 (1882-83) 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 at some point during the 1882-83 tour. The contents of the urn are reputed to be the ashes of an item of cricket equipment, possibly a bail, ball or stump. 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 because of its age and frailty. Since the 1998-99 Ashes series, a Waterford crystal trophy has been presented to the winners.

For more details about Ashes Series, please visit website:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ashes

Answer 3

The Ashes is when Australia and England play each other

Answer 4

England vs Australia might be every other year i was London last year frosty time England won 20years

Answer 5

Legendary Series... Battle between two of the oldest cricketing nations...Ausies n the English

Answer 6

IT IS A TEST SERIES PLAYED BETWEEEN THEM IN ENGLAND

Answer 7

here is the info-

The Ashes is a Test cricket contest played between England and Australia - it is one of cricket's fiercest and most celebrated rivalries and the oldest in international cricket dating back to 1882. It is currently played at approximately two yearly intervals, alternately in England and Australia. The Ashes are "held" by the country which last won a series and to "regain" them the other country must win more Test matches in a series than the country that "holds" them. If a series is "drawn" then the country holding the Ashes retains them. The last Ashes series was played in England in 2005 when England regained The Ashes after a gap of 16 years by winning the series 2-1. The next Ashes series will be in Australia in 2006-07 and the next series in England will be in 2009.

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 (1882-83) 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 at some point during the 1882-83 tour. The contents of the urn are reputed to be the ashes of an item of cricket equipment, possibly a bail, ball or stump. 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 because of its age and frailty. Since the 1998-99 Ashes series, a Waterford crystal trophy has been presented to the winners.

The Legend of The Ashes

The obituary notice that appeared in The Sporting Times.The first Test match between England and Australia had been played in 1877, but the Ashes legend dates back only to their ninth Test match, played in 1882.

On the 1882 tour, the Australians played only one Test, at The Oval in London. It was a low-scoring game on a difficult pitch. Australia made only 63 runs in their first innings, and England, led by A N Hornby, took a 38-run lead with a total of 101. In the second innings, Australia made 122, leaving England to score only 85 runs to win. Australian bowler Fred Spofforth refused to give in, declaring, "This thing can be done." He devastated the English batting, taking the final four wickets while conceding only two runs, to leave England a mere seven runs short of victory in one of the closest and most nail-biting finishes in cricket history.

When England's last batsman went in the team needed only 10 runs to win, but the final batsman Ted Peate scored only 2 before being bowled by Boyle. The astonished crowd fell silent, not believing that England could possibly have lost by 7 runs. When what had happened had sunk in, the crowd cheered the Australians.

When Peate returned to the Pavilion he was reprimanded by W G Grace for not allowing his partner at the wicket Charles Studd to get the runs. Despite Studd being one of the best batsman in England, Peate replied, "I had no confidence in Mr Studd, sir, so thought I had better do my best."

The defeat was widely recorded in the English press. In the 31st August edition of a magazine called "Cricket: A Weekly Record of The Game" there appeared a now obscure mock obituary to "English Supremacy in the Cricket Field which expired on the 29th day of August at the Oval". Two days later, September 2, 1882 a second mock obituary, written by Reginald Brooks, appeared in The Sporting Times. This notice read as follows:

"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."
The English media fastened on to this notice and dubbed the English tour to Australia of 1882-83 as the quest to regain The Ashes of English Cricket. The underlying metaphor of this naming is problematic, suggesting that English cricket is a sentient being which was killed by Australia, cremated and then somehow went in search of its own remains. The three match series resulted in a 2-1 win to England, notwithstanding a fourth match, won by an Australian XI whose status remains a matter of dispute.

The term "The Ashes" then largely disappears from public use for the next twenty years; certainly, there is no suggestion that this was the accepted name for the series. Then following the successful English tour of 1903-04 the English captain, Pelham Warner published a book called "How We Recovered The Ashes". Even though the legend is not referred to in the text, the title was enough to revive public interest in the legend. The first mention of "The Ashes" in the Wisden Cricketers' Almanack occurs in 1905 and the first Wisden account of the legend was included in the 1922 edition.


[edit] The Ashes Urn
As it took many years for the name the Ashes to be given to the ongoing series between England and Australia, there was no concept of there being a representation of the ashes being presented to the winners. As late as 1925, the following verse appeared in The Cricketers Annual:

So here’s to Chapman, Hendren and Hobbs,
Gilligan, Woolley and Hearne:
May they bring back to the Motherland,
The ashes which have no urn!
Nevertheless, several attempts had been made over the years to embody The Ashes in a physical memorial. Examples include one presented to Warner in 1904, another to Australian Captain MA Noble in 1909 and another to Australian Captain WM Woodfall in 1934.

The oldest however, and the one to enjoy enduring fame, was the one presented to Hon Ivo Bligh, later Lord Darnley, during the 1882-83 tour. The precise nature of the origin of this urn however, is matter of dispute. Based on a statement by Darnley made in 1894, it was believed that a group of Victorian ladies, including Darnley's later wife Florence Morphy, made the presentation after the victory in the third test in 1883. More recent researchers, in particular Ronald Willis [1] and Joy Munns [2] have studied the tour in detail and concluded that the presentation was made after a private cricket match played over Christmas 1882 when the English team were guests of Sir William Clarke, at his property "Rupertswood", in Sunbury, Victoria . This was before the matches had started. The prime evidence for this theory was provided by a descendant of Lord Clarke.

The contents of the Darnley 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, Lord 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. The urn itself is made of terracotta and is about four inches (10 cm) tall and may originally have been a perfume jar.

A six verse poem appeared in the 1 February edition of Melbourne Punch, the fourth verse of which makes reference to the urn; at some point this verse was glued to the urn and remains so to the present day. The verse in question reads [3]:

When Ivo goes back with the urn, the urn;
Studds, Steel, Read and Tylecote return, return;
The welkin will ring loud,
The great crowd will feel proud,
Seeing Barlow and Bates with the urn, the urn;
And the rest coming home with the urn.
In February 1883, just before the disputed fourth test, a velvet bag, which was 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 1924. However, 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 Cricket Ground and since 1953 in the MCC Cricket Museum at the ground. It is ironic that 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 the Ashes urn itself is never physically awarded to either England or Australia, but is kept permanently in the Museum where it can be seen together with the specially-made red and gold velvet and the scorecard of the 1882 match.

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, the urn is touring Australia again in 2006–7 arriving 17 October. It is first on display at the Museum of Sydney and then it tours to museums in other states ending at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery on 21 January 2007.

In the 1990s, given Australia's long dominance of the Ashes series, and the by now universal acceptance of the Darnley urn as ‘The Ashes’, 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. As its condition is fragile, and it is a prized exhibit at the MCC Cricket Museum, MCC were reluctant to 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 as it was essentially the property of his family and only given to the MCC for safe-keeping.

As a compromise, from 1998-99 the MCC commissioned a trophy in the form of a larger-scale replica of the urn in Waterford Crystal to award to the winning team of each series. This did little to diminish the status of the Darnley urn as most important icon in cricket, the symbol of this most ancient and keenly fought of contests.

check out these link-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ashes