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799 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 8 of 14.

  1. Jack Hobbs scored 199 first-class centuries, yet nobody noticed him as a teenagerNo cricketer has made more first-class runs or hundreds than Jack Hobbs: 61,760 runs and 199 centuries. Yet as a Cambridge teenager he was an apprentice gas fitter whom no coach a…
  2. James Anderson bowled with his eyes shut and took 704 Test wicketsAt the instant he releases the ball, James Anderson's head is down and his eyes are closed. Coaches tried to fix that action, and a former England fast bowler predicted in 2003 it…
  3. Jason Gillespie's first century was a Test double hundred as night-watchmanSent in late to protect the batting order, fast bowler Jason Gillespie stayed and stayed, finishing on 201 not out against Bangladesh on his 31st birthday. It was his first first-…
  4. Jeff Thomson hurled a cricket ball at 160 km/h with a javelin thrower's slingMost fast bowlers show the batter the ball as they run in. Jeff Thomson hid it behind his right knee, then slung it like a javelin. In 1975 high-speed cameras in Perth clocked him…
  5. The UAE cricket league that lets teams field nine overseas playersMost franchise T20 leagues cap overseas players at four or five per side. The International League T20 in the United Arab Emirates allows nine of the eleven, while insisting on on…
  6. India's Irani Trophy began as a one-off anniversary matchIn March 1960 Indian cricket staged a single match to mark 25 years of the Ranji Trophy: the national champions against a side drawn from everyone else. It proved too good to drop…
  7. The Ironman was built by stitching three Hawaiian races into one dayThe first Ironman simply glued together three existing Oahu events: a rough-water swim, a round-the-island bike race and the Honolulu Marathon. Moved to the lava fields of the Big…
  8. Ishan Kishan turned his first ODI hundred into the fastest double centuryIn December 2022 Ishan Kishan reached 200 against Bangladesh in just 126 balls, a dozen fewer than Chris Gayle's record. At 24 he was also the youngest to make an ODI double, and …
  9. India Today began with 5,000 copies and grew into India's most-read magazineLaunched in 1975 by a printing-press owner with his daughter as editor and his son as publisher, India Today started tiny. Within four years it passed 100,000 copies, and it went …
  10. India's women waited nearly fifty years to lift their first World CupIndia's women played their first Test in 1976, decades after the men. Twice they reached a World Cup final and lost. Then in November 2025, after chasing down 339 against Australi…
  11. Founded in 1885, the Congress party led India's long road to independenceWhen 72 years of struggle ended with independence in 1947, one organisation had led much of the way. The Indian National Congress, founded in 1885, was the first modern nationalis…
  12. Each IPL match is now worth more than thirteen million dollars in TV rightsBorn in 2007 partly to crush a rebel competition, the Indian Premier League became the richest cricket tournament on earth. Only America's NFL earns more per match. Its franchise …
  13. India's railway carries almost seven billion passengers a year on 13,000 daily trainsIndia's first railway, in 1837, hauled granite in Madras. Today the national network runs more than 13,000 passenger trains every day, carried 6.905 billion journeys in a single y…
  14. India built a football league on the IPL model, with Del Piero as baitIndia has played organised football since the Durand Cup of 1888, yet had no national league until 1996. In 2014 promoters borrowed the cricket playbook: city franchises, celebrit…
  15. Cricket's world body began as a three-nation club meeting at Lord'sIn 1909 delegates from England, Australia and South Africa gathered at Lord's and formed the Imperial Cricket Conference. More than a century later that small imperial club has be…
  16. India lost its first Test at Lord's, then conquered world cricketIndia lost its first Test, at Lord's in 1932, by 158 runs. In 1983 the side returned to the same ground and beat the two-time champions West Indies in the World Cup final, and it …
  17. IMDb began as one Bristol engineer's hobby list of filmsIMDb started as a hobby. From 1987 Col Needham, an English engineer at Hewlett-Packard in Bristol, logged every film he watched, and in 1990 he shared search scripts with a Usenet…
  18. Britain planned its war museum while the First World War still ragedBritain decided to build a museum of the First World War while the fighting was still going on. Proposed in February 1917 and approved by the War Cabinet within days, the Imperial…
  19. Imran Khan taught Pakistan reverse swing and won its first World CupPakistan had never won the Cricket World Cup until 1992, when its captain, Imran Khan, top-scored with 72 in the final and took the winning wicket himself. It capped a career that…
  20. India's hockey team went unbeaten at the Olympics for almost three decadesBetween 1928 and 1956 India's hockey team did not lose a single Olympic match, collecting six gold medals in a row on a 30–0 winning run. Twice it won the whole tournament without…
  21. Hugo Weaving voiced Megatron without ever watching a Transformers filmHugo Weaving gave Megatron his snarl in three Transformers films, and admitted he had never seen the first one while recording the second. He had never met the director, who brief…
  22. Hurling sends a cork ball faster than 150 kilometres an hour off an ash stickA well-struck sliotar can leave the hurley at over 150 kilometres an hour and fly 110 metres. Irish players chase it, catch it barehanded and balance it on a stick while sprinting…
  23. Parliament once sold Hyde Park for cash, deer included at extra costIn 1652 Parliament put Hyde Park on the market for ready money. It fetched 17,000 pounds, plus a separate 765 pounds and change for the deer living there. Eight years later the re…
  24. Ian Bell won the 2005 Ashes and still called it his lowest pointEngland reclaimed the Ashes in 2005 and Ian Bell collected an MBE for his part. Privately he counted it a low point. He averaged about 17 in the series, bagged a pair at The Oval,…
  25. 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…
  26. 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…
  27. 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.…
  28. 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…
  29. 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…
  30. 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…
  31. 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…
  32. 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, …
  33. 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…
  34. 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…
  35. Covent Garden is a typo-like echo of a monastery's walled orchardAround 1200 the monks of Westminster Abbey walled off a patch of fields west of London for orchards and crops. People called it the garden of the abbey and convent, and by 1515 th…
  36. 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…
  37. 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…
  38. 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…
  39. 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…
  40. 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…
  41. England's eleven years as a republic never found a government that lastedAfter Charles I was beheaded in January 1649, England abolished its monarchy and House of Lords and declared itself a Commonwealth. For eleven years it tried parliament after parl…
  42. 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…
  43. 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 …
  44. 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,…
  45. 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…
  46. 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…
  47. 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…
  48. 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 …
  49. 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…
  50. 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…
  51. 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…
  52. 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…
  53. 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 …
  54. 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…
  55. 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…
  56. 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…
  57. 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 …
  58. 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…
  59. 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 …
  60. 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…

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