The most famous rivalry in cricket — maybe in all of sport — is named after a fake obituary: a printed death notice for English cricket.
29 August 1882, The Oval: Australia beat England in a Test, in England, for the first time. Two days. Seven runs.
The Sporting Times printed a mock death notice: in affectionate remembrance of English cricket, which died at the Oval — the body to be cremated, and the ashes taken to Australia. A joke, a few lines of print.
That winter England's captain, Ivo Bligh, toured Australia vowing to bring those Ashes home, and was presented with a tiny urn — a private gift, said to hold the burnt remains of a bail. The joke became an object: the most famous four inches in sport, resting at Lord's, leaving for Australia only a handful of times in a century and a half.
A folk game from the Weald, codified by gamblers, exported by an empire, carried now by an urn and a myth. From a boy's game on grazing land to a burnt bail in a museum case: that's how cricket came into the world.