In 1998, the final year of Norma Izard’s five-year stint at the helm of the English Women’s Cricket Association (WCA), she made a decision that would change the course of sporting history. “The Australians kept on saying ‘why don’t we have a trophy when we play England?’ But they never did anything about it,” she would say in a 2017 interview. “So I thought, well, I’ll do it then. I was president, so nobody could stop me!”
Inspired by the men’s Ashes urn, she asked a friend, the woodcarver Brian Hodges, to sculpt a hollow wooden cricket ball. Then, on 20 July, she gathered together the England and Australian women’s cricket teams at Lord’s, had them sign a miniature bat, borrowed a wok from the kitchens of Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), burned the bat in it, and placed the “ashes” in the wooden ball.
