Keep the urn, but they can have Branson

Richard Branson, a man who has never knowingly missed an opportunity to self-publicise, stepped up and announced that the Ashes should stay in Australia. Sadly, in relying on Ian Botham to brief him, he picked someone whose knowledge of the game’s history might be best described as sketchy. The end result was that Branson was there to be picked off, and as David Hopps reports in his Guardian blog, Gideon Haigh did just that in response to Branson’s own version of events:

“The Ashes were burned when Britain, ehm when England, lost the 1882 game and it was turned into a trophy which the Australians took back to Australia and I think, and I may be wrong, but I think the MCC may be rewriting history."

He might as well have added that the Russians put the first men on the moon and that Alexander Graham Bell was the father of the railways. It brought an impassioned rebuke from Gideon Haigh, a renowned cricket writer and historian who has written for the Guardian on Ashes series for the past five years. It was time for a historically accurate version to take precedence.