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799 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 7 of 14.

  1. David Warner played for Australia before playing a single first-class matchIn January 2009 David Warner walked out at the Melbourne Cricket Ground for a Twenty20 international against South Africa, the first man since 1877 to represent Australia without …
  2. Delhi's IPL team topped the league twice yet waited until 2020 for a finalIn 2009 the Delhi Daredevils finished the Indian Premier League's group stage in first place, packed with stars such as Virender Sehwag and AB de Villiers. Then Adam Gilchrist hit…
  3. Derby County began as a cricket club's winter sideline and once sold for £3Derby County was created in 1884 by Derbyshire County Cricket Club to keep players and fans busy in winter and to bring in extra money. It became a founder member of the Football …
  4. Greek satyrs were part horse long before they became goat-legged faunsPicture a satyr and you probably imagine goat legs and little horns. Ancient Greek artists drew something different: a man with a horse's ears and tail, a snub nose and a mane of …
  5. Fulham fans once turned their backs on matches to watch the Boat RaceCraven Cottage sits right on the Thames in West London, so close that supporters standing on the old riverside terrace would turn their heads each year to watch the Oxford and Cam…
  6. Cricinfo began as a chat-room bot for homesick fans in AmericaIn 1993, cricket lovers living in countries like the United States could barely find a scorecard. A British researcher, Simon King, built a bot that shared scores over internet ch…
  7. Liverpool matched Manchester United's 20 titles in a record-breaking 2024–25 seasonManchester City began the 2024–25 Premier League as four-time defending champions. Liverpool ended their run, clinching the title with a 5–1 win over Tottenham at Anfield on 27 Ap…
  8. PSG won their first Champions League with a record 5–0 finalThe 2024–25 Champions League tore up its familiar groups of four for a single 36-team league table. It ended with the most lopsided final in the competition's history: Luis Enriqu…
  9. Arsenal end a 22-year wait to win the 2025–26 Premier LeagueArsenal had not won the Premier League since 2004. In 2025–26 they led the table for 238 days, survived a spell when Manchester City briefly edged ahead on goals scored, and were …
  10. Leicester's fairytale ended with the worst title defence in Premier League historyA year after their astonishing 2016 title, Leicester City lost their very first match to newly promoted Hull City, the first time a reigning champion had done that. They sacked Cl…
  11. Manchester City's 2017–18 Centurions became the first Premier League side to reach 100 pointsPep Guardiola's Manchester City finished the 2017–18 season with 100 points, 32 wins and 106 goals, all Premier League records. After a draw against Everton in August they won eig…
  12. The 2018 World Cup brought VAR, a German collapse and a teenage MbappéAt the 2018 World Cup in Russia, defending champions Germany failed to get past the group phase, something that had not happened to them since 1938. Video assistant referees made …
  13. Manchester City finally won the Champions League in Istanbul in 2023Istanbul's Atatürk Olympic Stadium had been handed the Champions League final twice before, in 2020 and 2021, only for COVID-19 to move it both times. When it finally hosted one, …
  14. Qatar 2022, the World Cup that moved to winter and ended with MessiThe 2022 World Cup was the first played in November and December, shifted to dodge Qatar's summer heat and forcing Europe's leagues to pause mid-season. It ended with perhaps the …
  15. Joke bribes, one abstention and the vote that gave Germany 2006On the night before FIFA picked the 2006 host, a German satirical magazine mailed delegates mock bribes: cuckoo clocks and Black Forest ham in exchange for backing Germany. The ne…
  16. How the 2010 World Cup started paying clubs for lending playersClubs had long grumbled that they paid players' wages while national teams borrowed them and sent some home injured. At South Africa's 2010 World Cup, FIFA finally paid up, handin…
  17. Vibrating watches, vanishing spray and the gadgets of Brazil 2014At Brazil's 2014 World Cup the referee wore a watch that buzzed whenever the ball fully crossed the goal line. Fourteen high-speed cameras, seven trained on each goal, fed a proce…
  18. Leicester City's 5,000 to 1 title cost bookmakers millionsIn August 2015 bookmakers offered 5,000 to 1 against Leicester City winning England's top division. Months earlier the club had been fighting relegation, and its new manager had j…
  19. France quietly arranged the 1998 World Cup draw to dodge BrazilTwenty years after France won its home World Cup by beating Brazil 3-0 in the final, organiser Michel Platini admitted a little trickery. Before the draw, a committee had placed F…
  20. Perth built a 61,000-seat stadium on an old rubbish dump with no car parkPerth Stadium sits on reclaimed flood plain in Burswood, partly on land that served as the city's municipal rubbish dump until 1971. Planners deliberately built no car park for it…
  21. London's Piccadilly is named after a tailor's frilly collarsAround 1611 a tailor named Robert Baker bought land west of London and grew rich selling piccadills, the fashionable stiff collars of the day. Within two years locals were calling…
  22. Piccadilly Circus's famous lights began with a Perrier sign in 1908The glowing adverts at Piccadilly Circus started modestly in 1908 with a sign for Perrier. Neon arrived with Bovril, Coca-Cola has held a spot since 1954, and in January 2017 the …
  23. Preity Zinta studied criminal psychology, then stumbled into Bollywood stardomPreity Zinta earned a postgraduate degree in criminal psychology and never meant to act. A chance meeting at a friend's birthday party landed her a chocolate advert, and tagging a…
  24. Australia's constitution never mentions its prime ministerAustralia's most powerful political job does not appear anywhere in its constitution. The drafters assumed Westminster conventions were so firmly rooted that writing them down was…
  25. Pakistan's women cricketers faced court cases and threats just to take the fieldWhen sisters Shaiza and Sharmeen Khan tried to start women's cricket in Pakistan in 1996, they met court cases and even death threats, and the government refused permission for a …
  26. Britain's Parliament granted almost every Chartist demand, just decades too lateIn the early 1800s, Old Sarum, a borough with seven voters, sent two members to Westminster, and so did Dunwich, a town that had largely slipped into the sea. Working people petit…
  27. Pat Cummins waited more than five years between his first two TestsPat Cummins won his debut Test at 18 with six wickets and the winning boundary, then vanished from Test cricket for 1,946 days with a broken-down back. He came back to become the …
  28. Why premium channels start films at odd times like 7:05Most television runs on the hour and half hour, but premium movie channels happily start a film at 4:40 in the afternoon. The reason lies in how they earn money: with subscribers …
  29. Penance and repentance share a root but split Christianity over deedsPenance and repentance grew from the same Latin word for a change of heart, yet during the Reformation they came to stand for rival answers to one question: does forgiveness depen…
  30. The old British penny once had to contain a penny's worth of copperIn 1797 Britain insisted a coin should hold metal worth its face value, so each new copper penny weighed a full ounce. The result was a coin so big, with a rim so thick, that peop…
  31. Pakistan's hockey team once won everything, including the very first World CupIn 1978 Pakistan's field hockey side became the first team ever to win three major international titles in a single year. Hockey is the country's national sport, and for three dec…
  32. Pakistan's cricket team earned its reputation as brilliant and unpredictable earlyJust seven days after an innings defeat in their first ever Test in 1952, Pakistan crushed India by an innings, with Fazal Mahmood taking 12 wickets. That swing from collapse to t…
  33. Pakistan's T20 league began in exile and grew into a billion-rupee businessThe Pakistan Super League played its first match in February 2016 not in Pakistan but in the United Arab Emirates, after two earlier attempts to launch it had failed. A decade lat…
  34. English may be named after a fishhook-shaped coastlineThe word English comes from Englisċ, meaning belonging to the Angles. Where the Angles got their name is murkier: perhaps from a Germanic root about narrowness or shallow coastal …
  35. An English scholar's Latin reform helped French become a written languageCharlemagne asked the English deacon Alcuin to tidy up Latin in his realm. Alcuin insisted words be pronounced as spelled, which made church sermons baffling to ordinary Romance s…
  36. Britain once lost 11 days and moved New Year from March to JanuaryIn 1752 people in England, Wales, Ireland and the American colonies saw September lose 11 days as their calendar switched to the Gregorian system. The same year, the start of the …
  37. Old Trafford lost the opening match of its own lifeManchester United moved into their grand new stadium on 19 February 1910 and promptly lost 4-3 to Liverpool. A reporter still called it the handsomest and most remarkable ground h…
  38. Tug of war and croquet were once Olympic sportsThe early modern Olympics handed out medals in croquet, tug of war, polo, jeu de paume and even motorboat racing. All eight of those sports have since vanished. Meanwhile breakdan…
  39. London's airport rules chopped five floors off Canary Wharf's towerOne Canada Square was drawn at 55 storeys and 263 metres. That would have poked into the flight path for nearby London City Airport, so the architects removed five floors. Even tr…
  40. One-day international cricket was invented because of rainIn January 1971 the first three days of a Test between Australia and England in Melbourne were washed out. Rather than send everyone home, officials abandoned the Test and staged …
  41. Europe's busiest shopping street was once the road to the gallowsAround 300,000 people a day walk Oxford Street, Europe's busiest shopping street. For centuries it was Tyburn Road, the route condemned prisoners took from Newgate to the Tyburn g…
  42. Pakistan's cricket board has been suspended and rebuilt again and againFour times the governing body of Pakistani cricket has had its rules suspended and its running handed to an emergency committee. Chairmen have been appointed by presidents, remove…
  43. The Old Bailey's Lady Justice wears no blindfold, on purposeAtop the dome of London's most famous criminal court stands a gilded Lady Justice holding sword and scales, and her eyes are uncovered. The court explains that she was never blind…
  44. Baseball's Hall of Fame was built on a myth to rescue a villageCooperstown became baseball's shrine because of a story that is not true: that Abner Doubleday invented the game there in the 1830s. A sewing-machine heir used that legend to lure…
  45. NatWest spent 17 years partly owned by British taxpayersOn 30 May 2025 NatWest became a fully private bank again, ending a 17-year stretch that began with a £45 billion government rescue. At one point the state held 84% of the group. I…
  46. How a dormant shell company became India's biggest media groupNetwork18 began life in 1996 as an inactive finance firm with no clear purpose. A regulatory squeeze turned it into the vehicle for a fast-growing news empire, and runaway expansi…
  47. Channel Nine was Still the One, until the ratings said otherwiseAustralia's Channel Nine put the first person on the nation's television screens in 1956 and later dominated so thoroughly that it won 77 of 80 ratings weeks across 2003 and 2004.…
  48. North India has been the stage for nearly every Indian empireFrom the brick cities of the Indus Valley to the Mughal court, the plains and hills of northern India hosted one great power after another: the Vedic chiefdoms, the Mauryas, the G…
  49. North London grew late, then split families over footballFor centuries London barely spread north of its old Roman wall: the ground beyond was marshy and the roads poor. Canals and railways finally turned those rural parishes into subur…
  50. NPR nearly went bankrupt, then got a record gift from McDonald's moneyIn 1983 America's public radio network ran up a deficit of nearly $7 million and came close to collapse. Twenty years later the widow of McDonald's founder Ray Kroc left it over $…
  51. Why a miniseries lets its characters change, and a soap opera cannotIn 1977, 130 million Americans watched the finale of Roots, a 71 percent share of the audience and at the time the highest-rated programme ever broadcast. Its secret was partly sc…
  52. The ticket examiner from Ranchi who won every limited-overs trophyBetween 2001 and 2003, MS Dhoni checked tickets on trains out of Kharagpur for Indian Railways. A few years later he was captaining India, and by 2013 he had become the only capta…
  53. MSN began as a dial-up service launched alongside Windows 95On August 24, 1995, Microsoft released Windows 95 and, with it, The Microsoft Network, a paid dial-up online service. Three decades later MSN is a free news portal. In between, th…
  54. The world's biggest stadium was built for cricket, not footballNo sports ground on Earth holds more people than the cricket stadium at Motera in Ahmedabad, with room for 132,000. When it opened it took the title of largest cricket ground from…
  55. From three O-levels and a Brixton flat to Downing StreetJohn Major left school just before turning 16 with three O-levels, spent months of 1962 out of work, and was once passed over for a bus conductor's job because of his height. Less…
  56. Jonny Bairstow made his best runs when Yorkshire were in troubleIn 2015 Jonny Bairstow played only nine County Championship matches yet scored 1,108 runs at an average of 92.33. Wisden noted that all five of his centuries that summer came with…
  57. The Somerset schoolboy who became England's greatest white-ball cricketerJos Buttler completed the run-out in the super over that won England the 2019 World Cup, then captained the side to the 2022 T20 World Cup title while top-scoring for his country.…
  58. Middlesex nearly folded in 1871, saved by a single voteSeven years after it was founded, Middlesex County Cricket Club was so short of money that members voted on whether to carry on. The result was 7 to 6 in favour. A few years later…
  59. London's Millennium Bridge wobbled because walkers fell into step with itOn 10 June 2000, some 90,000 people crossed London's sleek new footbridge over the Thames, and it began to sway sideways alarmingly. Two days later it shut for nearly two years. T…
  60. An Islington pub kept charging in shillings for twenty years after decimalisationBritain switched to decimal coins on 15 February 1971, but the King's Head in Islington did not. Its theatre founder, Dan Crawford, disliked the change, so for more than twenty ye…

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