Ashes Panel recalls fun, comic and controversial past Australian tours

The extra spark of the Ashes can often blur the thin line between the comic and the controversial.

With this in mind, our Ashes Panel got together to look back at some of the more memorable incidents that have raised a laugh or the temperature - depending on your point of view.

It's over to former captains David Gower, Sir Ian Botham, Bob Willis, Michael Atherton and Nasser Hussain for their picks...

David: A ham lunch

I remember becoming aware of a piglet running frenetically in front of the big scoreboard on The Gabba outfield just before lunch on the second day of the second Test on the 1982/83 tour. It was darting this way and that, and stewards were diving left, right and centre to try and trap it but they couldn't because it was moving too quickly.

It had a Union Jack taped to its tail and on one side was painted the name 'Gatting' and on the other was the name 'Hemmings'; for some reason they'd obviously gone for the slightly porkier of our team to christen this pig!

Ten minutes later they managed to catch it and removed it from the field. The story came out that it had been brought in by a couple of vets in an Esky or a cooler box. The guy at the gate had said 'what's this mate?' and they'd replied 'it's lunch' and been waved through. It turned out that our ingenious duo had sedated the piglet to get it into the ground and then given it the antidote 15 minutes before lunch.

The piglet woke up with the antidote coursing around its veins and shot off like a bullet. Far from having lunch with it, these guys had pulled off a cracking wheeze. At the end of the day Gatt took it well; as I recall Eddie wasn't quite so pleased to be implicated!

Athers: Winging it

David initially asked me to go on his fly-by on the 1990/91 Ashes tour but even at that early stage in my Test career I thought it probably wasn't a good thing to do, so I politely declined and scurried away to the nets! We were playing against Queensland out on the Gold Coast at a place called the Carrara Oval and as the game went on we knew David was up there somewhere.

The next thing I knew he and John Morris, who had accepted the goggles in my absence, were flying as good as through the ground's floodlights. We all thought it was tremendously funny and as they came over the ground we all pointed the plane out to our manager Peter Lush, who thought it was a tremendous hoot as well until he realised that two of his players were up there.

Then he rather lost his sense of humour and proceeded to slap a fine on the pair once they had landed safely and made their way back. In a sense the episode gave an insight into the tension that surrounded that tour. David felt the tour was lacking a bit of fun and therefore set out trying to inject some life into it, but that didn't go down well with Graham Gooch. When I look back now it was a fairly harmless episode but the fact that the management overreacted demonstrated the tension that was within the squad at that time.

Bob: An aluminium clanger

The 1979/80 series took place at a time when advertising and gimmicks were taking firm root in the game and Dennis Lillee wanted to promote a ridiculous object - an aluminium bat, which scuffed the ball every time it made contact. It made a rather different sound when struck - something akin to the tinny clang you get when a ball hits a car bonnet, rather than the sweet sound of leather on willow or a golf ball struck out of the middle on an old wooden club.