Intellect PlusCricket
620 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 11 of 11.
Adam Gilchrist, the wicket-keeper who hit hard and walked when he knew he was outAdam Gilchrist changed what Australia expected from the player behind the stumps. A left-hander who attacked from ball one, he became the first to hit 100 Test sixes, yet he was f…- How Adar Poonawalla took a Pune vaccine maker to more than 140 countriesWhen Adar Poonawalla joined his father's Serum Institute of India in 2001, it sold to 35 countries. Within about fourteen years that figure passed 140, with most of the money comi…
Sheep, bicycles and a 1911 scoreboard: the long life of Adelaide OvalBefore the first ball was bowled at Adelaide Oval in December 1873, some 2,000 sheep grazed the turf down to playing height. Since then the ground has held a cycling track, a near…- From a Rajasthan cotton trade to aluminium, cement and a cricket franchiseIn 1857 Shiv Narayan Birla began trading cotton in the desert town of Pilani. Five generations later the business his family built makes more of India's cement than anyone else, r…
How Afghanistan climbed from refugee-camp cricket to Test status in sixteen yearsAfghanistan's cricketers first learned the game as refugees in Pakistan during the 1980s and 1990s, practising on Peshawar's grounds. Their board joined the ICC's lowest tier in 2…- Ajinkya Rahane, the stand-in captain who led India to victory at the GabbaAjinkya Rahane rarely held the job for long, yet he was one of India's most successful captains. Handed the Test team in Australia in December 2020 while Virat Kohli went home for…
London beat favourite Paris by four votes to host a third OlympicsParis was the clear favourite, on its third recent attempt, when the IOC voted in Singapore in July 2005. London had been trailing badly until Sebastian Coe took charge of its bid…
England won their first cricket World Cup on boundaries after two tiesAt Lord's on 14 July 2019, England and New Zealand each made 241, forcing the first Super Over ever played in a one-day international. That finished level too. England lifted the …- Before India's 2023 World Cup, the trophy was launched into the stratosphereWeeks before the first ball, the men's Cricket World Cup trophy rode a balloon up into the stratosphere and came down at the stadium in Ahmedabad, making it the first sports troph…
- Abdul Qadir kept leg spin alive when cricket had written it offIn the late 1970s wrist spin looked like a dying art, squeezed out by pace. Then an imam's son from Lahore came bounding to the crease with a leg-break, a topspinner, a flipper an…
- India finally won a World Cup final at home in 2011Until April 2011, no country had lifted cricket's World Cup on its own turf. India changed that at Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai, beating Sri Lanka by six wickets in the first final …
- Number 10 was a cheap speculative build by a former spyBritain's most famous front door belongs to a house Winston Churchill called shaky and lightly built. Its namesake, Sir George Downing, was a spy for Oliver Cromwell and later Cha…
At the 1900 Paris Olympics, many winners never knew they were OlympiansThe second modern Olympics sprawled across Paris from May to October, had no opening ceremony, and rarely used the word Olympic at all. Folded into a World's Fair, its events were…
Thin air, a new track and a flop made Mexico 1968 a record factoryMexico City sits 2,240 metres above sea level, and no Summer Olympics before or since has been staged so high. In October 1968 that thin air, plus a brand-new synthetic track and …- The 1992 World Cup rain rule that asked for 22 runs off one ballSouth Africa needed 23 runs from 13 balls in a World Cup semi-final. Then came a ten-minute shower, and when play resumed the scoreboard demanded 22 from a single delivery. That a…
- How Sri Lanka's reckless opening overs won the 1996 World CupIn the mid-1990s a one-day side was happy with 50 or 60 runs from the first 15 overs, while fielders were forced to stay close in. Sri Lanka's openers treated those overs as a fre…
- The 1999 World Cup Super Six format that made some wins worthlessAt the 1999 Cricket World Cup, beating a weak team in your group could count for nothing. A new Super Six stage threw away results against sides that failed to advance, so what re…
Walkovers and misread rain sums rewrote cricket's first African World CupIn 2003 Kenya, a country without Test status, reached a World Cup semi-final, something no side of its kind has managed before or since. It got there partly because New Zealand re…
From spinning disks to the cloud: the evolution of the moving imageBefore high-definition streaming and smart TVs, television was a mechanical marvel of spinning disks and silhouettes. We often forget that the medium's origins lay in experimental…
The ancient, mathematical struggle to fix the date of EasterEaster is a moveable feast, drifting through the calendar according to a complex lunisolar dance. This instability sparked centuries of intense theological debate, ranging from fi…