Cricket equipment - stumped

A vital component of the kit you’ll need as part of your cricket equipment, cricket stumps have their own history.

Getting started

The three vital pieces of cricket equipment you need to get started are the bat, the ball and the cricket stumps. The stumps are three vertical posts supporting the bails to form a wicket at each end of the pitch. The stumps are 28 inches tall and usually made of wood. They have a spike at one end for hammering into the ground, and the other end is domed with groove to provide a resting place for the bails.

Each stump is referred to by a specific name:

• Off stump is the stump on the off side of the wicket.
• Middle stump is the stump in the middle of the wicket.
• Leg stump is the stump on the leg side of the wicket.

The third stump

The third stump was introduced as a part of cricket equipment in 1775. This came about after Five of England's Edward "Lumpy" Stevens bowled the ball clean through the last Five of Hambledon batsman's stumps without dislodging the bails - not once but three times, in May 1775. Nowadays it is very unlikely for a ball to pass through and not dislodge a bail.

The Ashes

The Ashes are one of the most popular sporting fixtures, causing many youngsters to haul their cricket equipment out of the cupboard to emulate their cricketing heroes.  The trophy known as The Ashes is permanently held at Lord's cricket ground no matter who wins the series. It is an urn said to contain the ashes of stumps and bails used in a match when England toured Australia in 1882–83. The urn was given to the England captain Ivo Bligh by a group of Melbourne women. The action followed the appearance of an obituary notice in the Sporting Times the previous summer announcing the ‘death’ of English cricket after defeat by the Australians in the Oval test match.
The stump-cam
A new piece of cricket equipment is used for television coverage – the ‘stump cam’.  Often one or more of the stumps is hollow and contains a small television camera. This is aligned vertically, but can view through a small window on the side of the stump via a mirror. The so-called stump-cam gives a unique view of play for action replays, particularly when a batsman is bowled.

End of play

Stumps is used as a term to mean the end of a day's play, e.g. "The umpires called stumps" means that the umpires declared play over for the day. At the end of a session, i.e. before lunch or tea, the umpires will remove the bails; at the end of the day's play, the umpires will remove the stumps.

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