One Ashes star was so good as a two-year-old a man made $100,000 betting he’d play a Test for England
Forget winning a couple of hundred bucks on a roughie in the Melbourne Cup, this is the kind of bet dreams are made of.
Imagine facing up to a two-year-old deliberately bowling wronguns then giggling at you when he beats you all ends up.
It sounds like fiction, but according to a friend of England bowler Josh Tongue’s father, it’s what happened when he faced up to the now 28-year-old in the late ’90s.
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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 for England.
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.
Josh Tongue celebrates the wicket of Josh Inglis on day one of the Adelaide Test in the 2025 Ashes series. Getty
Piper, who is in Australia for the Ashes series, told the story as a guest on Fox Cricket’s day two coverage in Adelaide on Thursday.
“I’ve been best friends with his dad for 35 years,” Piper said, “Phil, he’s here today.”
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.
“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.’
“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’.
“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’.
“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.”
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.
“I ironed it, I kept it in my cupboard for 14 years,” he said.
Tim Piper holds aloft the bet slip that won him $100,000. Fox Cricket
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.
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.
“As I said I’m a gambler, I’m a bad gambler as well,” he said.
Tongue was brought into the England side for the first time this Ashes series for the third Test in Adelaide.
He took 1-64 from his 16 overs in the first innings, dismissing Josh Inglis for 32.
