Bygones: When Yorkshire CCC and England star Darren Gough made Ashes history in Sydney

The event featured a silent charity auction and a raffle to raise money for the Yorkshire Cricket Foundation, the club’s community arm.

Gough found memorabilia relating to Virat Kohli and Mahendra Singh Dhoni, the legendary India cricketers, for an event attended by some 300 guests.

But Gough found something else during the course of his ferreting - something he thought he’d lost… the ball with which he performed his Ashes hat-trick at Sydney in 1999.

Next Tuesday marks the 25th anniversary of that feat, which came during the final Test of a series Australia won 3-1.

Remarkably, it was the first Ashes hat-trick by an Englishman since Jack Hearne, a fast-medium bowler for Middlesex, bagged the illustrious scalps of Clem Hill, Syd Gregory and Monty Noble at Headingley in 1899.

There has not been an Ashes hat-trick since Gough’s by an Englishman either.

Gough’s victims on January 2, 1999, were Ian Healy, Stuart MacGill and Colin Miller, his rediscovery of the ball a happy coincidence ahead of the silver anniversary.

“I was just going through some stuff at home for the Diwali dinner and I happened to find it,” says Gough, Yorkshire’s managing director of cricket.

“I thought I’d lost it, but it was in a bag that also had a ticket from the game, my boots from the game and my shirt from the game, which the three guys (Healy, MacGill and Miller) had signed.

“I don’t know what to do with it now; perhaps I’ll give it to the club, or to Lord’s, I don’t really know. It’s probably worth a few quid, too.”

Gough’s hat-trick came towards the end of day one after Australia chose to bat first.

They had been well-placed at 242-3 following the early departures of Mark Taylor, Michael Slater and Justin Langer only for the Waugh twins, Steve and Mark, to fashion a 190-run fourth-wicket stand.

Steve fell for 96, followed by Yorkshire’s Darren Lehmann for 32, and then Mark for the top score of 121, at which point Australia were 319-6.

They lost their last five wickets for three runs in 15 deliveries as Gough ran riot with the second new ball.

“My first wicket, Ian Healy… that one kind of bounced, caught the glove and was caught by wicketkeeper Warren Hegg,” remembers Gough. “It was a good delivery, bowled at good pace.

“Then Stuart MacGill came in… he’d smashed us a bit in the previous Test, got 40-odd, and was a dangerous lower-order player. He could score quickly - similar to Warnie (Shane Warne) - and he had a good eye.

“Anyway, I did him with an absolute beauty - a yorker that knocked his poles out. Then ‘Funky’ Miller came in and, I mean, when you talk about the perfect delivery… I mean, that was a Jimmy Anderson-type delivery.

“It started off on leg stump, swung and clipped off. It was a perfect ball with the new ball. I think it would have done a lot better players than him.”

As Miller trudged off, the ground bathed in sunlight and shadow as a raucous crowd cheered, Gough was mobbed by his team-mates.

There followed a comical moment - at least for everyone apart from the ‘victim’ - when he threw back his arms and accidentally whacked the person standing behind him, pace bowler Alex Tudor.

“The next thing I knew, I nearly broke Alex Tudor’s teeth, didn’t I,” laughs Gough. “Or he banged his teeth into my head, whatever it was.

“I remember we had a party that night, a sponsor’s thing, and the worst thing about the hat-trick was that all our families had gone back to the hotel to get changed because we were all going to this party. So my family missed it, unfortunately.”

Amid the celebrations, the memories and the mementos, there is sadness for Gough as he recalls the one family member who never got to know about the hat-trick at all - his grandfather, Fred, who died on the eve of the first Test in Brisbane.

For Gough, the winds of fate had blown full circle as, prior to the corresponding Test on the previous Ashes tour, his eldest son, Liam, was born.

“It was the total opposite to the last time I was there in ‘94,” he says. “On that occasion, I had to play after the joy of being woken up to be told about the birth of my son; I didn’t even know the wife had gone into labour.

“This time, I got a call at 10 the night before the game about my granddad, so I wasn’t in the best frame of mind going into the Test.

“I was rooming with Robert Croft, and I think ‘Crofty’ rang ‘Grav’ (David Graveney, chairman of selectors) just to say, ‘I don’t think ‘Goughy’ is in a good place right now.

“I remember going down to the bar, having a couple of pints and I think it got to midnight and ‘Grav’ said, ‘Look, we’re all totally supportive, what do you want to do? We’ll support you whatever…’

“‘Grav’ was great. I said I would see how I was in the morning and, yeah, I played.

“Of course, I wanted to go home because I thought the world of my granddad but you end up staying because you’re playing for your country and, as my dad said to me, my granddad wouldn’t have wanted me to go back anyway - and he wouldn’t.

“There was never any fuss with my granddad - he was a tough, strong bloke who had ‘love’ and ‘hate’ on his knuckles and I spent a lot of time with him and my grandma when I was growing up. I certainly never lipped back to him, I know that.”

Gough greatly appreciated it when the England players wore black armbands in memory of his granddad, whose memory he honoured with the wicket of Justin Langer, lbw, on the first day.

However, he would have appreciated it just as much had those team-mates held on to a succession of chances off his bowling.

“I had seven catches dropped off me in that first Test - seven,” emphasises Gough. “It was a bad week for me - my granddad died and I had seven catches dropped.

“I could have given in after that Test, gone home or something, but I finished that tour with 20-odd wickets and bowled really well.

“It was a good tour all-round; we were pretty close to Australia that tour, even though we lost 3-1, because it could easily have been 2-2 and, remember, it was an era when Australia dominated and had one of the greatest sides in the game’s history.”

Defeat by 98 runs in Sydney denied England the chance to square the series, leg-spinner MacGill taking 12 wickets.

Gough’s hat-trick was one of the highlights of a career in which he also took three for Yorkshire - including four wickets in five balls against Kent in the County Championship at Headingley in 1995.

“I was on a hat-trick so many times because I was a hat-trick type bowler,” he says.

“That’s just the way I was because I had the ability, at my peak, and before my knee injuries, to bowl quickly and to bowl yorkers and, if you can do that, you’re always going to have a chance of getting hat-tricks.

“You only have to look at the guys who get them, whether it be Waqar, Wasim, myself, Malinga, Bumrah… those sort of guys are always going to be in with a shout of hat-tricks.

“I was on a hat-trick so many times in Test matches, too, but to do it against Australia, in Sydney, was amazing.”

In addition to the hat-trick memorabilia he found in his house, which had been hiding away in some corner of the loft, Gough has “a small Ashes hat-trick thing” he keeps “out of the way”.

Apparently, it’s the only cricketing memento on display in the home – a revealing, and perhaps surprising admission by a man who would thus have made for the perfect guest on Through the Keyhole, the television game show in which a studio panel tried to guess the owner of a house based on its contents.

“I don’t really put cricket things up in the house,” says Gough, 53.

“People who come to me wouldn’t even know I played cricket.

“You go to some people’s houses and you know they’ve been a cricket player, but you go to my house and you wouldn’t have a clue.

“All my England caps are upstairs somewhere in, like, a fifth bedroom that’s an office space, but there’s nothing up that anyone would see.”

Perhaps it is just as well given the floor/wall space that would be needed to do justice to a glorious career.