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799 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 5 of 14.

241. Zaheer Khan, the left-arm swing bowler who tormented the world's best left-handersZaheer Khan dismissed Matthew Hayden, Kumar Sangakkara, Graeme Smith and Sanath Jayasuriya more than 10 times each. The left-arm paceman from Shrirampur in Maharashtra mastered re…
242. Zimbabwe's cricket giant-killers, from stunning Australia to toppling South AfricaIn its first ever official one-day international, at the 1983 World Cup, Zimbabwe beat Australia, with captain Duncan Fletcher scoring 69 not out and then taking 4 for 42. The tea…
243. Women played a cricket World Cup two years before the men didThe first Cricket World Cup was not a men's event. Two years before the men's inaugural tournament, a women's competition in England organised by Jack Hayward featured Young Engla…
244. Australia's grip on the Women's T20 World Cup: seven titles in ten editionsSince the ICC Women's T20 World Cup began in England in 2009, Australia have won it seven times, most recently beating England in the 2026 final. Only three other teams have lifte…
245. Yorkshire, English cricket's most successful county, began as Sheffield in disguiseYorkshire have won 33 County Championship titles, more than any other English side. Yet when a team first played under the county's name in 1833, all eleven players came from Shef…
246. Yuvraj Singh hit six sixes in an over, then came back from cancerAt the 2007 World Twenty20, Yuvraj Singh hit Stuart Broad for six sixes in one over, the first time it had happened in a match between two Test nations. Four years later he starre…
247. The London museum built from a marquess's hoard, left to his sonWhen Lady Wallace gave about 5,500 artworks to Britain in 1897, she attached a strict condition: nothing could ever leave, not even on loan. For over a century the Wallace Collect…
248. Why so many church steeples are topped by a roosterThe cockerel perched on countless church spires is a Bible reference. It recalls the rooster that crowed after Peter denied Jesus three times, and a ninth-century pope reportedly …
249. Wembley Arena started life as a swimming pool with no pillarsBefore it hosted Queen, ABBA and Madonna, Wembley Arena was a swimming pool. Built for the 1934 British Empire Games and used for Olympic swimming and diving in 1948, it was desig…
250. The Nottingham suburb once won in a card gameIn 1523 the Musters family acquired the West Bridgford estate by winning it at cards. Four centuries later their name is still on its main road, and their tight rules on house siz…
251. The high-school disc game that still expects players to referee themselvesUltimate began as a pastime in a New Jersey school parking lot and grew into a sport with world championships and IOC recognition. Through all of it, one oddity survived: at most …
252. Cricket's youth World Cup, where Lara, Kohli and Gayle first stood outThe first youth World Cup in 1988 was a one-off tied to Australia's bicentenary, and nobody staged another for a decade. Its roster reads like a future hall of fame: Brian Lara, M…
253. Why billion-dollar startups stopped being as rare as unicornsWhen investor Aileen Lee named privately held startups worth over a billion dollars after a mythical beast in 2013, she could count 39 of them. By May 2024 CB Insights tallied 1,2…
254. Virat Kohli batted on the morning after his father diedIn December 2006 an 18-year-old Delhi batter ended a day's play unbeaten on 40, with his side in trouble against Karnataka. His father died that night. Virat Kohli came back the n…
255. Viv Richards was sent back to bat twice in one innings, and failed both timesAt 17, playing for Antigua against St Kitts, Viv Richards was out first ball. Six thousand spectators poured onto the field in protest, so officials let him bat again to calm thin…
256. Voice of America opened its first German broadcast with a promise to be honestOn 1 February 1942, weeks after Pearl Harbor, a shortwave programme aimed at Germany began with the Battle Hymn of the Republic and an unusual pledge for wartime radio: the news m…
257. Charlton fans dug their stadium out of a chalk pit, then fought to reclaim itIn 1919 Charlton Athletic had no money to build a ground, so volunteer supporters dug a pitch into the floor of an abandoned sand and chalk pit and piled the spoil into makeshift …
258. A Bollywood star's cricket franchise became the Caribbean league's most successful teamIn 2015 a company led by Bollywood actor Shah Rukh Khan bought into Trinidad's Caribbean Premier League side. It was the first time an Indian Premier League owner had invested in …
259. Twenty20 cricket was a marketing team's answer to empty county groundsBy 2002 English county cricket was playing to thinning crowds. So four staff from the England and Wales Cricket Board's marketing, sales and sponsorship teams pitched a 20-over ga…
260. Singapore's Straits Times was born from a bankrupt merchant's printing pressAn Armenian merchant in Singapore ordered a printing press from England to start a newspaper, but his editor died before it arrived and he went bankrupt. A friend bought the equip…
261. The Sunday Times borrowed a famous name and then kept inventing newspaper firstsThe Sunday Times had nothing to do with The Times when it took that name in 1822. It began as The New Observer, apparently hoping to ride another paper's success. Over the next ce…
262. The Sydney Morning Herald started as a 750-copy weekly in 1831Three employees of the Sydney Gazette launched a four-page weekly in 1831 with a print run of just 750. Renamed The Sydney Morning Herald after John Fairfax bought it, it became A…
263. How India's biggest media group changed hands through a jail sentenceIn 1947 the industrialist Ramkrishna Dalmia took over Bennett, Coleman and Co., owner of The Times of India, using money moved from a bank and an insurer he chaired. A parliamenta…
264. The Oval began as a cabbage patch and hosted the first FA Cup finalIn 1844 the land that became the Oval was a market garden growing cabbages for the Duchy of Cornwall. Within four decades it had staged England's first home Test match, the first …
265. The Shard began as a sketch on the back of a restaurant menuOver lunch in Berlin in 2000, architect Renzo Piano told developer Irvine Sellar how much he disliked conventional tall buildings, then turned over the menu and sketched something…
266. Miaphysitism: the one-nature doctrine that split early ChristianityFor fifteen centuries Christians have disagreed over a single Greek word, physis, meaning nature. Is Christ one nature that is fully divine and fully human, or one person with two…
267. Michael Atherton, the England opener Steve Waugh nicknamed The CockroachFacing South Africa in 1995, Michael Atherton batted for 643 minutes to finish on 185 not out and save a Test. That kind of stubbornness led Steve Waugh to call him The Cockroach.…
268. Mike Hussey waited until 30 for a Test cap, then scored at record speedMichael Hussey had piled up 15,313 first-class runs before Australia finally handed him a Test cap at 30. Once in, he wasted no time. He reached 1,000 Test runs in just 166 days, …
269. Middlesex, the Saxon county that London's suburbs swallowed wholeIn 1771 the novelist Tobias Smollett joked that if London kept spreading, all of Middlesex would one day be covered in brick. He was right. The small county framed by the Thames, …
270. The Hundred invented a new cricket format to win new fansCricket already had Tests, one-day games and Twenty20 when England's cricket board decided to try something stranger: each side gets exactly 100 balls. The Hundred remains the onl…
271. The Independent: from brash 1986 launch to online-only newspaperThree journalists walked out of The Daily Telegraph and launched a rival in 1986 under the cheeky slogan It is. Are you? Within three years The Independent sold over 400,000 copie…
272. The Lady Vanishes: the train thriller that carried Hitchcock to HollywoodA young Englishwoman dozes off on a train crossing Europe. When she wakes, the kindly older lady sharing her compartment has gone, and every passenger swears she never existed. Al…
273. London's O2 Arena was built inside the Millennium Dome with no cranesWhen builders set out to put an arena inside the old Millennium Dome, they hit an awkward problem: cranes would not fit under the tent. So they assembled the roof on the ground, h…
274. Marylebone got its name from villagers trying to escape the gallowsFor centuries the hamlet near today's Marble Arch was known for one thing: the Tyburn gallows, where public executions drew crowds. When a new church to St Mary went up by the loc…
275. MCC began because gentlemen cricketers were tired of being heckledIn the 1780s London's aristocratic cricketers played on open fields in Islington, where the public wandered in and shouted opinions about the play. The gentlemen were not amused. …
276. Matthew Hayden was nearly written off before breaking the Test recordAfter 13 Tests, Matthew Hayden averaged just over 24 with one century, and he was being compared to players who dominate at home but never crack international cricket. Then, on a …
277. The Hockey World Cup was Pakistan's idea, but politics sent it to BarcelonaField hockey's World Cup was dreamed up by a Pakistani air marshal, and its trophy was made by the Pakistani Army. Yet the very first tournament, planned for Pakistan in 1971, end…
278. Cricket's fastest World Cup grew from an English marketing pitchTwenty20 cricket started as a rescue plan. English county crowds and sponsorship were shrinking, so a marketing manager suggested games of just 20 overs a side. County chairmen ap…
279. A Tudor headmaster who championed English, games and educating girlsIn 1561, when Latin ruled every classroom, the first head of Merchant Taylors' School argued that English deserved equal standing. Richard Mulcaster wrote one of the earliest Engl…
280. Even the word metaphor is a metaphor about carrying things acrossCall a window by its old name and you get wind eye, a buried image hiding in an everyday word. The term metaphor is itself one of these: it comes from Greek for a transfer of owne…
281. Marnus Labuschagne became Test cricket's first concussion substitute and seized itOn 18 August 2019, Steve Smith was ruled out of a Lord's Ashes Test after being hit on the head the day before. Under a brand-new rule, Australia sent in a replacement: Marnus Lab…
282. Martin Crowe fell one run short of a triple centuryIn Wellington in 1991, New Zealand trailed Sri Lanka by 323 runs on first innings. Captain Martin Crowe batted for over ten hours and reached 299, the highest score ever by a New …
283. Banned in 1919, Germany's air force trained in secret on Soviet soilThe Treaty of Versailles forbade Germany any air force at all, and its wartime squadrons were dissolved in 1920. Yet by the start of the Second World War the Luftwaffe was among t…
284. Victorians judged fame by one test: were you in wax at Tussaud's?In Victorian London, a satirist joked that nobody counted as truly popular until Madame Tussaud had cast them in wax. Charles Dickens called her museum an institution. It began wi…
285. America's professional cricket league held its first draft at NASA's Houston space centreCricket has long been a niche sport in the United States, and earlier leagues fizzled after a single season. Major League Cricket arrived in 2023 with a billion-dollar backing dea…
286. Marble Arch once guarded Buckingham Palace and later hid a tiny police stationLondon's Marble Arch was built as the grand gateway to Buckingham Palace. Queen Victoria's growing household needed the space, so in the late 1840s the whole structure was dismant…
287. Four minutes behind his twin, Mark Waugh became cricket's great slip catcherMark Waugh arrived four minutes after his brother Steve, and in their very first cricket match both twins were out without scoring. Mark went on to become one of the most graceful…
288. London Zoo was built for scientists and let the public in only laterWhen London Zoo opened in Regent's Park on 27 April 1828, ordinary Londoners were not invited. It was a research collection for fellows of a learned society, the world's first sci…
289. Thomas Lord dug up his turf twice and carried it to new groundsThe most famous cricket ground on Earth is actually its founder's third attempt. When the rent rose, Thomas Lord lifted his grass and relaid it elsewhere; when Parliament routed t…
290. Portugal's King Luís turned down Spain's crown and translated Hamlet insteadIn 1869 Spain went shopping for a new monarch and looked hard at Portugal's King Luís. He refused in print: born Portuguese, he declared, and Portuguese he would die. Accepting mi…
291. Lucknow Super Giants remain the only active IPL side never to reach a finalLucknow's IPL franchise cost its owners ₹7,090 crore in 2021, roughly US$830 million, and in its first season it could not play a single match at home. Two playoff runs followed, …
292. Britain's busiest railway station stands on the site of the original BedlamBetween April 2023 and March 2024, 94.5 million passengers passed through London Liverpool Street, more than any other station in Britain. Its 10-acre footprint once held the Beth…
293. London's inside-out Lloyd's building won top protection and a hefty repair billRichard Rogers put the stairs, lifts, ducts and water pipes of the Lloyd's building on the outside, leaving the interior wide open. In 2011 it became the youngest structure ever g…
294. London's Olympic Stadium traded 80,000 Games seats for a football club tenantFor the 2012 Olympics and Paralympics, the stadium in Stratford held 80,000 spectators for athletics and all four ceremonies. Afterwards it was rebuilt with 66,000 seats and becam…
295. London Victoria began as two rival stations squeezed side by sideWalk across London Victoria and it can feel like two stations stitched together, because it was. One company opened a terminus for Brighton trains in 1860, a rival opened another …
296. The Roman wall around London still decides where the City's roads runAround AD 200 the Romans ringed Londinium with a stone wall two miles long. Most of it is gone, yet it still shapes the City of London: almost every modern road into the old walle…
297. Waterloo was never meant to be a terminus, which explains its confusing platformsBritain's largest station by floor space, with more platforms than any other, began life in 1848 as a stopping point on a line meant to push on to the City of London. That extensi…
298. Liberty's Tudor-style London store was built from the timbers of two warshipsThe black-and-white beams of Liberty on Great Marlborough Street are not fake. When the store rose in 1924, its timber came from two Royal Navy ships, HMS Impregnable and HMS Hind…
299. Eight in ten North Americans can no longer see the Milky WayAbout 83 percent of humanity sleeps under skies measurably brighter than natural darkness, including 99 percent of people in Europe and the United States. Most North Americans hav…
300. Britain protects castles, phone boxes and even the Beatles' Abbey Road crossingIn the United Kingdom you can be prosecuted for fixing up your own house the wrong way, if it happens to be listed. The protection covers far more than stately homes: milestones, …

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