The Ashes

The Ashes is how to describe a "series" or group of cricket matches played by England and Australia.

The name comes from a small pot (known as an "urn") of ashes, which was made and presented to a former England captain in 1882, following a joke printed in The Sporting Times, an English newspaper, in 1882: Australia beat England in a series and someone placed an advertisement in the pages of the paper, describing how English cricket had died and its body had been cremated.