{"id":357294,"date":"2025-12-19T01:56:10","date_gmt":"2025-12-19T01:56:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/357294\/"},"modified":"2025-12-19T01:56:10","modified_gmt":"2025-12-19T01:56:10","slug":"ashes-cricket-news-2025-england-man-tim-piper-won-100k-betting-on-bowler-josh-tongue-to-play-test-cricket","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/357294\/","title":{"rendered":"Ashes cricket news 2025 | England man Tim Piper won $100k betting on bowler Josh Tongue to play Test cricket"},"content":{"rendered":"

Forget winning a couple of hundred bucks on a roughie in the Melbourne Cup<\/a>, this is the kind of bet dreams are made of.<\/p>\n

Imagine facing up to a two-year-old deliberately bowling wronguns then giggling at you when he beats you all ends up.<\/p>\n

It sounds like fiction, but according to a friend of England<\/a> bowler Josh Tongue’s father, it’s what happened when he faced up to the now 28-year-old in the late ’90s.<\/p>\n

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Tim Piper was so taken by the prodigious talent of toddler Tongue that he went out in search of a bookmaker who would frame a market for him on the two-year-old to play cricket<\/a> for England.<\/p>\n

He didn’t get the bet on at that time, but years later, when Tongue was 11, Piper found a bookie who was prepared to take his money. Or at least that’s what the bookie would have thought at the time. <\/p>\n

\"Josh<\/p>\n

Josh Tongue celebrates the wicket of Josh Inglis on day one of the Adelaide Test in the 2025 Ashes series. \u00a0Getty<\/p>\n

Piper, who is in Australia for the Ashes<\/a> series, told the story as a guest on Fox Cricket’s day two coverage in Adelaide on Thursday.<\/p>\n

“I’ve been best friends with his dad for 35 years,” Piper said, “Phil, he’s here today.”<\/p>\n

The charismatic storyteller from the England town of Redditch then described how he first was able to identify Tongue as a future Test star in a backyard.<\/p>\n

“We start chucking a tennis ball, you know, it’s a real long, you call it a yard, overrun, and he’s throwing a tennis ball at him and he’s getting forward, he’s getting forward, he’s two-and-a-half at the time. I said ‘Yeah, he’s got potential’. He said, ‘You want to see him bowl.’<\/p>\n

“I can bat myself, but he started bowling leggies and offies and the wrong’un and the topspinner to me, I was shaking my head. I said, ‘what’s this little kid doing, Phil’? I said ‘it’s a fluke’.<\/p>\n

“And as he’s bowling he’s laughing, because he knows what he’s bowling. I haven’t got a clue. Then I’ve shook my head and walked off. I got back home to the missus and I said, ‘I don’t know what happened here tonight.’ I said ‘this little two-year-old sorted me out’.<\/p>\n

“I got the bet on when he was 11 years of age. One-hundred pounds at 500\/1. It paid 50k in England, which is $100,000 here.”<\/p>\n

Piper said he was so convinced that the bet would come through he looked after the bet slip as though it was a treasured item of clothing.<\/p>\n

“I ironed it, I kept it in my cupboard for 14 years,” he said.<\/p>\n

\"Tim<\/p>\n

Tim Piper holds aloft the bet slip that won him $100,000.\u00a0Fox Cricket<\/p>\n

Tongue, now a fast bowler rather than the spin wizard Piper may have expected him to be, made his Test debut against Ireland in 2023 to deliver the payout.<\/p>\n

Piper revealed that after cashing out he gave the cricketer that made the windfall possible 5,000 pounds “for a trust fund for his son”, treated himself to a Caribbean holiday “with the missus”, then hinted that some of it had gone to the bookies.<\/p>\n

“As I said I’m a gambler, I’m a bad gambler as well,” he said.<\/p>\n

Tongue was brought into the England side for the first time this Ashes series for the third Test in Adelaide. <\/p>\n

He took 1-64 from his 16 overs in the first innings, dismissing Josh Inglis for 32.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Forget winning a couple of hundred bucks on a roughie in the Melbourne Cup, this is the kind…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":357295,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[564],"tags":[64,63,740,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-357294","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cricket","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-cricket","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=357294"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357294\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/357295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=357294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=357294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=357294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}