The Ashes Urn Takes Its Name From A Funeral Service, Not A Cricket Pitch

Every time England and Australia meet for the Ashes, commentators reach for the same handful of phrases without thinking much about where they came from. Two of the biggest, a sticky wicket and the Ashes itself, turn out to have origins that pull in opposite directions: one is exactly what it sounds like, the other is not about cricket at all.

A pitch that turns nasty

A sticky wicket is real cricket, not metaphor first. It describes a pitch that has been rained on and then dried in the sun, leaving the surface tacky and unpredictable, so the ball grips, spits and turns in ways batsmen cannot read. The earliest known use of the phrase in print is from Bell’s Life in London in July 1882, reporting on the touring Australian side’s troubles on a rain-affected ground: “The ground… was suffering from the effects of recent rain, and once more the Australians found themselves on a sticky wicket.”

There is a popular story that the phrase actually comes from sponge-on-a-stick toilet implements, on the theory that such an object might once have been called a wicket. It has never been true. Objects like that existed, but they were never called wickets, and the cricket sense predates any such claim by decades anyway.

The figurative use, meaning any awkward or difficult situation, took a while to catch on outside the ground. The earliest documented non-cricket use appears in April 1930, in the Jamaican newspaper The Gleaner, where a speaker apologised for the weather during his remarks: “I am afraid tonight, owing to the rain we have had in this island of Springs, I am batting on rather a sticky wicket.” Within a couple of generations the phrase had left the pitch entirely and become a general-purpose way of describing any tricky patch.

Why the urn is called the Ashes

The urn itself tells a stranger story. After England lost to Australia at home in 1882, a mock obituary in a newspaper declared English cricket dead and its body to be cremated, its ashes taken to Australia. Before leading England’s tour to Australia that winter, captain Ivo Bligh took the joke and made it a pledge, promising to bring back “the Ashes of English cricket.” The urn presented to him on that tour, whatever its actual contents, gave the rivalry its permanent name.

That name only works because “ashes” already carried a heavy, funereal weight in English, and that weight comes from a specific source: the burial service in the Book of Common Prayer, spoken by the priest as earth was cast onto the coffin, committing the body “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life.”

Two phrases, one funeral

Most people assume that line is scriptural. It is not. The exact wording “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” does not occur anywhere in the Bible itself, despite drawing on biblical ideas about mortality. It is liturgy, not scripture, written for the graveside and borrowed by an 1882 journalist for a cricket joke that stuck.

So the two phrases sit oddly together. A sticky wicket is cricket describing itself, plainly and literally, before drifting into general use. The Ashes is the opposite: a funeral phrase borrowed to describe cricket, which then became so associated with the game that most people now assume it was cricket’s word all along.