Cricket is played on a strip 22 yards long, under Laws written by a London club in 1788, in matches that can last five days and still end level. These stories run from a Hampshire field in the 1770s to a World Cup decided by counting boundaries, by way of a weathervane torn off by a barrage balloon and a batsman who needed four runs and got none.
Every tile in a Cricket game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Legends
nine stories
1The doctor who played 44 seasons
On the tile: W.G. Grace1865-1908
William Gilbert Grace qualified as a doctor in 1879 and kept a practice in Bristol, but it was the enormous black beard he grew in 1870 that made him recognizable. He played first-class cricket for 44 seasons, from 1865 to 1908, a record-equaling span, and captained England, Gloucestershire and the Marylebone Cricket Club. The International Cricket Council repeats the old saying that in his playing days crowds came to the grounds mainly to watch Grace bat. His 22 Tests brought 1,098 runs and two centuries.
Jack Hobbs scored more runs in first-class cricket than anyone who has played the game, more than 61,000, and his centuries number 197 or 199, depending on whether two made on a private 1930-31 tour of India and Ceylon count. Statisticians later ruled those matches first-class; Wisden never recognized the centuries. In 61 Tests he made 5,410 runs at an average of 56.94, and the Test century he scored in 1928-29 at the age of 46 is still a record. In 1953 he became the first professional cricketer to be knighted.
Wilfred Rhodes bowled slow left arm for Yorkshire from 1898, and he was still doing it for England in April 1930, when he played against the West Indies at Sabina Park in Kingston at the age of 52. Guinness World Records lists him as the oldest man ever to play a Test match. His Test career had by then run more than 30 years, and he finished with 127 Test wickets and 2,325 Test runs.
Don Bradman walked out at The Oval on August 14, 1948, for his last innings in Test cricket. He needed four runs to finish with a batting average of exactly 100. England's players took off their caps and gave him three cheers, the crowd stood, and two balls later Eric Hollies bowled him for nothing. Bradman said afterward that the reception had stirred his emotions deeply and left him anxious. He finished with 6,996 runs at 99.94.
Learie Constantine played for the West Indies from 1928 to 1939 and was one of the finest fielders of his era. His 4 for 35 and 5 for 87 helped win his side's first victory over England, in 1930. His batting and bowling averages were modest; the rest of his life was not. He fought racial prejudice in Britain, was appointed MBE, served as Trinidad and Tobago's High Commissioner in London, and took a seat in the House of Lords as Lord Constantine.
On August 31, 1968, at Swansea, Garfield Sobers, captaining Nottinghamshire against Glamorgan, faced an over from Malcolm Nash and hit every ball of it for six. The first four were clean blows. Roger Davis caught the fifth at long-off but fell onto the boundary, and the umpires signaled six. The last ball went for six too. Sobers was the first batsman in first-class cricket to take six sixes from a six-ball over. He had already made 365 not out in a Test, a record at the time.
Enid Bakewell played only 12 Test matches, between 1968 and 1979, and in them she scored 1,078 runs at an average of 59.88 and took 50 wickets at 16.62. She went on playing one-day internationals until 1982. The International Cricket Council, which elected her to its Hall of Fame in 2012, calls her one of the great all-rounders ever to play the women's game. She was born in Nottinghamshire in 1940.
8The first double century in a one-day international
On the tile: Belinda Clark1997
Belinda Clark made 229 not out against Denmark in Mumbai on December 16, 1997. It was the first double century scored in a one-day international by anyone, in the men's game or the women's, and it stood as the highest score in women's one-day internationals for more than twenty years. Sachin Tendulkar became the first man to reach 200 in a one-day international a little over twelve years later. Clark captained Australia to World Cup titles in 1997 and 2005, and the ICC put her in its Hall of Fame.
9Eight hundred wickets, the last off his final ball
On the tile: 800 wickets2010
Muttiah Muralitharan took the 800th wicket of his Test career with the last ball he ever bowled in a Test, on July 22, 2010. Cricket does not often arrange its endings that neatly. He holds the record for most wickets in both Tests and one-day internationals, 800 and 534, and he spent 1,711 days at the top of the ICC's Test bowling rankings, a stretch covering 214 matches. Wisden had named him the greatest Test bowler back in 2002.
Thomas Lord opened his first cricket ground in 1787, on the fields where Dorset Square now stands, and the club that played there became the Marylebone Cricket Club. Rising rent moved him in 1811, and Parliament's chosen route for the Regent's Canal moved him again in 1814. Both times he lifted his turf and carted it to the new site. The ground he finally settled on drops about eight feet from one side of the playing area to the other.
2The weathervane that was Lord's only war casualty
On the tile: Father Time1926
In 1926 the architect Herbert Baker gave Lord's a weathervane as a surprise gift, meant to make up for the cost and late completion of the grandstand he had designed there. The whole piece stands about six feet six inches tall, cast iron painted black, with gilding on the tip of the wind arrow and on Father Time's scythe. During the Second World War the cables of a drifting barrage balloon caught it and wrenched it from the stand. Father Time was the only casualty at Lord's in that war, and he spent the rest of it in the Committee Room.
Outside the Bowlers' Bar at Lord's hangs a bell, and before an international match someone rings it to signal that play is about to start. The tradition began in 2007, when England welcomed the West Indies, and an invitation to ring it is treated as an honor. Viv Richards and Garfield Sobers have taken a turn. So have the umpire Dickie Bird, the writer Stephen Fry and the Olympic sprinter Yohan Blake.
Broadhalfpenny Down is a stretch of Hampshire grass with an inn across the road, the Bat and Ball, and the club that plays there today calls it the ground where the modern game grew up. In the 1770s the Hambledon Club played on the down and did its business across the road at the inn, where, as the ground's own history tells it, the rules were argued out over dinner and ale. One of those debates added a third stump to the wicket. On September 6, 2026, a match on the down marked 250 years of the third stump.
5The stadium that calls itself Test cricket's birthplace
On the tile: The MCG1853
The Melbourne Cricket Ground was established in 1853, less than 20 years after Melbourne itself was founded, and its own account calls it the birthplace of Test cricket, in 1877. The largest crowd ever to watch a day of cricket there, 94,199, came on December 26, 2025, for the first day of the Boxing Day Ashes Test, beating the 93,013 who saw the 2015 World Cup final. On March 8, 2020, 86,174 people watched Australia play India there in the women's Twenty20 World Cup final.
6The cricket ground that held the first FA Cup final
On the tile: The Oval1872
The Oval has been Surrey's home since 1845, when 10,000 turfs were carted over from Tooting Common and laid in the spring. It was the first ground in England to stage a Test match, in September 1880. It was also the field where, on March 16, 1872, the Wanderers beat the Royal Engineers 1-0 in the first FA Cup final, and in 1870 it held the first representative soccer match between England and Scotland. The gasholders have overlooked all of it since 1853.
Adelaide Oval opened for cricket in December 1873, and in 1911 it began using a scoreboard designed by the architect F. Kenneth Milne. More than a century later the scoreboard on the Hill is still worked by hand. The National Trust listed it in 1984 and the South Australian Heritage Register added it in 1986. Visitors on the stadium tour climb its stairs. A ten-letter limit means some players' names have to be shortened or replaced by nicknames.
Eden Gardens in Kolkata was established in 1864 and staged its first Test match in January 1934. For the 1987 World Cup its capacity was expanded from 40,000 to about 100,000, and a crowd unofficially estimated at 110,000 came for the 1996 World Cup semi-final between India and Sri Lanka. Renovations before the 2011 World Cup brought the seating down to about 68,000. The Cricket Association of Bengal calls it the most majestic cricket ground in the world.
9The desert ground with the most one-day internationals
On the tile: Sharjahsince 1984
Sharjah Cricket Stadium was built in the United Arab Emirates in the early 1980s and staged its first internationals during the Asia Cup in April 1984. It drew good crowds, mostly from the country's South Asian population, and its tournaments were organized by the Cricketers Benefit Fund Series, set up in 1981 by Abdul Rahman Bukhatir to honor cricketers from India and Pakistan. The ground says it holds the Guinness record for one-day internationals at a single venue, with 255, and it has now staged more than 300 international matches.
Cricket does not have rules. It has Laws, and they belong to a private members' club. The Marylebone Cricket Club was formed in 1787, and the following year it set down a code requiring the wickets to be pitched 22 yards apart and spelling out how a player could be given out. More than two centuries on, the MCC is still the custodian and arbiter of the Laws, and the International Cricket Council relies on it to write and interpret them.
A wicket used to be two stumps with a single long bail laid across the top, and the gap between them was wide enough to matter. In 1775 Edward Stevens, known as Lumpy, sent three balls clean through that gap against the Hambledon batsman John Small without disturbing the bail, and Small was given not out each time. The outcry produced a third stump. A wicket today is nine inches wide and 28 inches high, three stumps and two bails.
3The over has been four, five, six and eight balls
On the tile: Six-ball over1880-1980
An over is six balls, and Law 17 says so plainly. It has not always been six. England bowled four-ball overs until 1888, five-ball overs through the 1890s and six from 1900, then switched to eight in 1939 and went back to six after the Second World War. Australia used eight-ball overs on and off until 1979. As late as 1980 the Laws still let the two sides agree on six or eight before a match. Every Test since 1979-80 has used six.
4The first batter timed out in international cricket
On the tile: Timed out2023
Law 40 gives an incoming batter three minutes to be ready to receive the ball, and the playing conditions for the 2023 World Cup allowed only two. Miss the deadline and you are out, timed out, and the bowler gets no credit for the wicket. Six batters in first-class cricket had gone that way, but nobody in an international match until November 6, 2023. Angelo Mathews of Sri Lanka was already late when the strap of his helmet broke. Bangladesh appealed, and the umpires gave him out without his having faced a ball.
In December 1947 the Indian bowler Vinoo Mankad held on to the ball in his delivery stride and took off the bails with the Australian Bill Brown well out of his crease at the other end. Brown was run out, quite legally, and that kind of dismissal has carried Mankad's name, and a faint whiff of disgrace, ever since. By 2022 the Laws had it filed under Law 41, unfair play. That year the MCC moved it, wording unchanged, into Law 38, where every other run out lives.
Before Law 1, before the players and the umpires and the ball, the Laws of Cricket put a preamble on the Spirit of Cricket. It asks that the game be played not only according to the Laws but within that spirit, and it names respect as the heart of the matter: respect for opponents, for teammates, for umpires and their decisions. It asks for self-discipline when things go badly, and for thanks to the officials afterward, whatever the result.
A leg spinner's usual ball turns one way. The googly, bowled with what looks like the same action, turns the other, and the batsman tends to find out too late. Bernard Bosanquet of Middlesex first used one in a County Championship match at Lord's in July 1900, against Leicestershire, and a batsman named Sam Coe became the first man known to be dismissed by it. Nobody is sure where the word googly came from. The ball also goes by the name bosie, after the man who invented it.
Three wickets in three balls is a hat trick, and the hat is supposed to be a real one. The story goes that in 1858 H.H. Stephenson, playing for an All-England Eleven at Sheffield, took three wickets with three balls, and a collection bought him a hat. The Online Etymology Dictionary is more guarded: it says the bowler allegedly received a hat from his club, or was allowed to pass one around for cash, and that a conjurer pulling things from a hat probably helped the phrase along.
Australia beat England by seven runs at The Oval on August 29, 1882, England's first Test defeat at home. Within days the Sporting Times printed a mock obituary for English cricket, adding that the body would be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia. That winter Ivo Bligh took a team out vowing to bring the ashes back. Lord's says he was given a small terracotta urn outside Melbourne on Christmas Eve 1882, though accounts of the gift differ. The urn now lives in the MCC Museum, and the teams play for an urn-shaped crystal trophy.
Australia played England at Melbourne from March 15 to 19, 1877, in the match now counted as the first Test. Charles Bannerman made 165 before retiring hurt, and Australia won by 45 runs. A hundred years later the same two countries met on the same ground for a Centenary Test. Dennis Lillee took 11 wickets, David Hookes hit five fours in a row off the England captain, and Australia won by 45 runs, the same margin as in 1877.
In the fourth Ashes Test at Old Trafford in 1956, the England off spinner Jim Laker took nine Australian wickets for 37 runs in the first innings and all ten for 53 in the second. His match figures were 19 for 90 off 68 overs. Nobody has taken 19 wickets in a first-class match before or since, and the ten in an innings remains the best analysis in Test cricket. Laker finished his career with 193 Test wickets at 21.24.
West Indies made 453 and 284 at Brisbane in December 1960. Australia made 505 and then, chasing in the last over, 232. The totals matched exactly, 737 apiece, and with the scores level Joe Solomon threw down the stumps to run out Ian Meckiff. It was the first tie in Test history, and in more than 2,500 Tests played since 1877 it has happened twice. That West Indies side was captained by Frank Worrell, the first Black cricketer to captain the West Indies for a whole series.
The first cricket World Cup was held in England in 1973, two years before the men's, and it was a women's tournament. Rachael Heyhoe Flint pushed for it, and the businessman Jack Hayward put 40,000 pounds toward the cost. England won. Heyhoe Flint averaged 45.54 across 22 Tests and hit the first six in a women's Test. Even so, Lord's did not stage a women's one-day international until 1976.
The men's first World Cup final was played at Lord's on June 21, 1975, over 60 overs a side. Clive Lloyd made 102 from 85 balls for the West Indies, who finished on 291 for 8. Australia lost three men to run outs by Viv Richards in the field and fell 17 runs short. Lloyd captained the West Indies to a second title in 1979, and during his captaincy they went 27 Test matches without defeat.
Australia made 401 for 9 at Headingley in 1981 and bowled England out for 174, a deficit of 227, so England had to follow on. Ian Botham then made 149 not out. Bob Willis took 8 for 43 in the fourth innings, and England won by 18 runs. England took the series 3-1, and the summer has been known as Botham's Ashes ever since, which is hard on Willis.
India had been given odds of 66 to 1 to win the 1983 World Cup, and in the final at Lord's they were bowled out for 183, which looked like the end of it against a West Indies side that had won the first two tournaments. Instead the West Indies were out for 140 and India won by 43 runs. Mohinder Amarnath took 3 for 12 and was named player of the match. Kapil Dev, the captain, had made an unbeaten 175 earlier in the competition.
Australia set South Africa 214 to win a World Cup semi-final at Edgbaston in 1999. With the last pair together, Lance Klusener hit the first two balls of the final over for four, which leveled the scores. Two balls later he mishit a shot and ran. Allan Donald, at the other end, was watching the ball, did not hear the call, and set off only when Klusener had nearly reached him. He was run out by some distance. The match was tied, and Australia, who had finished above South Africa in the Super Six table, went through to the final and won it.
Australia had won 16 Test matches in a row, a world record, the last of them at Mumbai, when they made India follow on at Kolkata in March 2001. VVS Laxman then scored 281 and Rahul Dravid 180, and the pair batted through the whole fourth day, adding 376. India won by 171 runs, only the third time in Test history that a side following on had won, and the streak stopped at 16. Steve Waugh had captained Australia in 15 of those 16 wins.