Intellect PlusCricket
620 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 10 of 11.
Ian Botham's careers teacher asked what he was really going to doWhen a teenage Ian Botham said he wanted to be a sportsman, his careers teacher replied that everyone wants to play sport, so what was he really going to do? A coach at Lord's rat…
Cricket's one-day rankings can reshuffle overnight without a single ball bowledEvery May, cricket's one-day international table can change order while every team sits idle. Old results simply age out: the oldest year of matches vanishes and a more recent yea…- In T20 cricket rankings, a win is always worth exactly 100 points more than a lossThe formula behind international Twenty20 rankings hides a neat symmetry. Whatever the teams' strengths, victory pays precisely 100 points more than defeat and 50 more than a tie.…
Test cricket's rankings count a two-match series as three gamesTest cricket's official table treats a series win as worth a whole extra match. Each Test won earns one point and each draw half, but taking the series adds a bonus point. So when…
Why Horse Guards still holds a four o'clock punishment parade every dayEvery afternoon at four, soldiers and horses line up for inspection at Horse Guards in London. The ritual began in 1894 when Queen Victoria reportedly caught the guards drinking a…
Cottage cheese got its name from farmhouse kitchens and its big break from wartime meat rationingDuring the First World War, American posters urged people to eat cottage cheese so that meat could go to soldiers, with one claiming a pound of it held more protein than a pound o…
One sovereign state, four countries, and British law still hesitates over the wordEngland, Scotland and Wales field their own football teams and compete separately at the Commonwealth Games, yet none of them appears on the international standard list of countri…
Before cricket's County Championship existed, newspapers simply declared a champion countyEnglish counties were playing each other at cricket by 1709, but for nearly two centuries nobody officially kept score of who was best. Champions were crowned by popular acclaim, …- County Durham owes its unusual name to centuries of rule by prince-bishopsNo other English county is routinely called County Something, a habit more at home in Ireland. Durham earned it because for centuries its bishops ran it as a county palatine, larg…
- Medieval Flanders was a slice of France that France never got backIn the Middle Ages the rich cloth cities of Ghent, Bruges and Ypres belonged to the Kingdom of France, and the Count of Flanders ranked among the original twelve peers of the real…
Coventry's arena was meant to rival Wembley and ended up a smaller, oft-renamed stadiumCoventry once pitched itself as the home of England's national stadium, promising a 90,000-seat bowl. What it eventually got, four years late, was a 32,000-seat ground built on an…
Jet bombers raced coronation film across the Atlantic for same-day broadcastTo show Elizabeth II's 1953 coronation to Canadians the same day, the RAF flew BBC film across the Atlantic in Canberra jet bombers, the first non-stop flights between Britain and…- The coroner began as a medieval tax guardian for the English crownThe word coroner shares its root with crown. In September 1194 England ordered every county to elect three knights and a clerk as keepers of the pleas of the crown, officials mean…
- How a thrashing in Australia turned Clive Lloyd's West Indies into championsIn 1975-76 the West Indies lost a Test series in Australia 5-1 and endured constant racist abuse along the way. Their captain, Clive Lloyd, responded by building a team around rel…
From Sumerian boxers to the UFC octagon, fighting sports keep reinventing themselvesWrestling may be the closest thing humanity has to a universal sport, arising independently in cultures across the globe. Boxing contests go back to ancient Sumer in the third mil…- India's chief auditor is shielded so the government cannot punish its criticIndia's Comptroller and Auditor General checks how the national and state governments spend public money, and the Constitution goes out of its way to keep that watchdog independen…
- A conflict of interest is a risk, not an accusation of wrongdoingHaving a conflict of interest does not mean anyone has done something wrong. It describes a situation, such as holding two roles whose loyalties pull in opposite directions, that …
- Cork is peeled from living oaks that go on growing for centuriesEvery wine cork began as bark on a cork oak that was never cut down. Harvesters strip the trunk by hand with a sharp axe, roughly once every nine years, and the tree keeps living,…
Asia's oldest football league began by shutting Indian clubs out entirelyFor its first fifteen seasons the Calcutta Football League admitted British army sides, merchants and missionaries but no Indian clubs at all. When Mohun Bagan and Aryan were fina…- Calypso served Trinidad as a newspaper, a protest and later a global pop crazeMany Trinidadians once trusted calypso songs more than any newspaper. Singers carried news of scandal and corruption from town to town, and when censors pushed back they turned to…
The Caribbean Premier League rose from a Twenty20 scene wrecked by a fraud arrestWest Indies Twenty20 cricket was first organised by a financier, Allen Stanford, whose tournament collapsed when he was arrested for fraud in 2009. The league that eventually repl…
A gym crowd and a Glasgow shop assistant turned Carnaby Street into a fashion iconIn the early 1950s Carnaby Street was a drab run of sweatshops, locksmiths and an electricity depot. Its reinvention began around the corner, where a physique photographer opened …
London's Egyptian obelisk nearly sank off Spain inside an iron ship built around itTo get a 3,400-year-old obelisk from Alexandria to the Thames, engineers sealed it inside a floating iron tube with a rudder and a mast and towed it out to sea. A storm in the Bay…- Brentford spent almost two decades getting from a stadium plan to a finished groundWhen Brentford first announced a new home near Kew Bridge in 2002, the scheme even included a monorail. That idea vanished, and the club did not confirm the ground was ready until…
- Why Britain's Parliament must still approve the army's very existence in peacetimeEngland once went to war with militias, noble retinues and hired foreigners, raising a proper force only for the length of a campaign. A civil war changed that, and the resentment…
Brooklyn was a big city of its own until New York swallowed it in 1898On its own, Brooklyn would rank as the fourth largest city in the United States, behind only the rest of New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. It kept its independence until 1898, wh…
London's BT Tower was an official secret that a million visitors touredIn 1978 a judge ruled that London's tallest structure could be named in court only as Location 23. It was a strange order, since the tower had been visible from nearly everywhere …
Blood sport first meant hunting on horseback before it meant bear-baitingThe label blood sport covers anything staged for sport or spectacle that ends in bloodshed, from Roman gladiators to cockfights. It started life describing mounted hunts, spread t…- India's cricket board once paid the state broadcaster to show its matchesThrough the 1980s and early 1990s, the Board of Control for Cricket in India handed Doordarshan 5 lakh rupees a match just to put the national team on television. A 1995 Supreme C…
- Mumbai changed its name in 1995, but its high court still says BombayThe city officially became Mumbai in 1995, yet the court at its heart never followed. A bill to rename it the Mumbai High Court, alongside new names for the Calcutta and Madras co…
Sheffield United's stadium began as a cricket ground and staged a TestBramall Lane opened for cricket in 1855 and became the birthplace of Yorkshire County Cricket Club, yet it is now the oldest major stadium still hosting professional football. It …- Brendon McCullum saved his fastest Test hundred for his very last TestIn February 2016, playing the final Test match of his career, the New Zealand captain reached a century in 54 balls, the fastest ever in Test cricket. It was a fitting sign-off fo…
Australia's Big Bash League swapped the coin toss for flipping a cricket batFrom the 2018–19 season, captains in Australia's Big Bash League stopped tossing a coin and started flipping a bat to decide who bowled first. It was one of many experiments in a …- Big Ben's clock is fine-tuned with a small stack of old penniesResting on the pendulum of the Great Clock of Westminster sit pre-decimal pennies. Adding one nudges the centre of mass upward, shortening the pendulum's effective length so it sw…
- Blackstone's founders built its name from German and Greek versions of their ownStephen Schwarzman and Peter Peterson named their 1985 firm with a bilingual pun: Schwarz is German for black, and Peter comes from the Greek word for stone. Starting with $400,00…
The teenage swing bowler who dismissed Sachin Tendulkar for a first-class duckIn the 2008/09 Ranji Trophy final, a young Uttar Pradesh bowler named Bhuvneshwar Kumar became the first ever to get Sachin Tendulkar out for nought in first-class cricket. Known …- Bangladesh's women once beat India to claim an Asia Cup India nearly always winsIn 2018, in Malaysia, Bangladesh's women won four of five group games, then beat India in the Twenty20 Asia Cup final. It remains the only time any side other than India has lifte…
A careless bonfire of oily rags gave London its first Palladian buildingIn January 1619, workmen tidying up after New Year revels at Whitehall burned their rubbish inside James I's wooden banqueting house and destroyed it. The replacement, designed by…
London's Barbican rose from a bombed ward where only 48 people still livedBy 1951, wartime bombing had left the Cripplegate ward of the City of London almost empty, with just 48 residents. Planners replaced it with a raw concrete village of walkways, to…- The first cash machine in history was first used by a British actor in EnfieldOn 27 June 1967, a Barclays branch in Enfield installed the world's first cash machine, and the actor Reg Varney was the first to use it. It was one of several banking firsts from…
Battersea Power Station was once hailed as a temple of power rivalling St Paul'sFour towering chimneys on the Thames, a brick shell among the largest anywhere, and a control room dressed in Art Deco marble: Battersea was built to generate coal-fired electrici…- Cricket's simplest statistic crowns Bradman and flatters a famously hopeless batterA batting average is just runs divided by dismissals. That simple sum gives Don Bradman a Test figure of 99.94, so far clear of everyone that some statisticians call him the great…
- Ben Stokes left school with one GCSE and became England's great all-rounderBorn in Christchurch, New Zealand, Ben Stokes moved to Cumbria at 12 when his father took a rugby league coaching job, and left school at 16 with a single qualification, in PE. He…
- Britain's part-time soldiers, dismissed by Kitchener, held the line in 1914When war broke out in August 1914, Lord Kitchener sneered that the Territorials were young men led by middle-aged professionals playing at soldiers. Within months these part-timer…
- Delhi's Kotla ground has staged cricket records on fourteenth-century soilAnil Kumble took all ten wickets in a Test innings here in 1999, only the second bowler ever to do it. The Delhi ground, founded in 1883 as Feroz Shah Kotla, sits on land that bel…
- How Australia's cricket team became the most successful in the sportAustralia won the very first Test match, at Melbourne in 1877, and has kept winning ever since. With 427 Test victories, six World Cup titles and a mock newspaper obituary that cr…
Earth's tilted axis gives us seasons, and the Moon keeps it steadySummer and winter exist because Earth spins on an axis leaning about 23.44 degrees from upright. That lean keeps pointing the same way among the stars all year, so each hemisphere…
Bangladesh cricket survived record losing streaks to beat the world's bestBetween 2001 and 2004, Bangladesh lost 21 Tests in a row, and a separate run of 23 straight one-day defeats is also theirs. Critics asked whether the country had been promoted too…- Andrew Strauss went from injury replacement to Ashes-winning England captainAndrew Strauss only got his first Test cap because Michael Vaughan hurt his knee in the nets. At Lord's in 2004 the left-handed opener made 112 and 83, took the match award, and b…
- Andy Flower, Zimbabwe's finest batter, became a title-winning coach abroadFor three months in late 2001, the best-ranked Test batsman in the world played for Zimbabwe. Andy Flower kept wicket for his country for over a decade, averaged above 51 in Tests…
Aravinda de Silva carried Sri Lanka from underdogs to 1996 world championsNo other player has made a hundred and taken three or more wickets in a World Cup final. Aravinda de Silva did both in the 1996 showpiece against Australia, removing Mark Taylor a…- A cathedral choirboy who became England's patient opener and Test captainBefore he was a batting machine, Alastair Cook was a clarinet-playing chorister with a punishing rehearsal timetable. His cricket break came by accident: a visiting MCC side turne…
- Alex Hales, picked as a fast bowler, became England's first T20 centurionAt sixteen, Alex Hales walked out at Lord's in a Cricket Idol tournament and plundered 55 from one over: eight sixes, a four and three no-balls. The organisers had actually chosen…
- Ally Pally burned twice, hosted a racecourse, and launched regular public televisionSixteen days after 102,000 people turned up for its grand opening, the north London People's Palace was a shell. It rose again, later housed wartime internees, jammed German bombe…
Wimbledon's home began as a croquet club that grudgingly spared one lawnThe All England Club started life in 1868 amid a craze for croquet, not tennis. Lawn tennis got a single lawn in 1875, and the first champion, Spencer Gore, doubted the game would…- Allan Border learned his flat-bat shots on a Mosman baseball diamondThe Australian who became the only batsman to pass 150 in both innings of a Test first sharpened his horizontal-bat strokes playing baseball. Across the street from his childhood …
- White Lightning: the zinc-smeared quick who spearheaded South Africa's returnAllan Donald was supposed to be twelfth man on his first-class debut, called up ten minutes before the toss. Six years later he took five wickets in South Africa's first ever one-…
- Freddie Flintoff's six landed in the stands, where his own father dropped itAt Edgbaston in July 2004, twenty thousand spectators watched Andrew Flintoff launch a ball into the Ryder Stand's top tier. One man rose to take the catch and spilled it: Colin F…
- The Pakistani all-rounder nicknamed Popeye after spinach made him illIn 2005 Pakistan discovered why its all-rounder Abdul Razzaq kept feeling sick on the field: he was eating too much spinach. Teammates promptly started calling him Popeye. By then…
- The Thames market town that gave the world Radiohead and Old Speckled HenAbingdon, a small Oxfordshire town on the Thames, packs in surprises. Radiohead formed there in 1985 while its members were pupils at Abingdon School, its brewery made Old Speckle…