Tom and Ben Curry will become the first twins to play together for England’s men’s rugby union side in their Six Nations opener against Ireland on Saturday, but fraternal and sororal pairs have a long and intriguing sporting history. Here are four of the most intriguing …

Billy and Teddy May

The Mays, who played in the early years of the Football League towards the end of the 19th century, sometimes but not always in the same team, experienced all the pleasures and perils of life in sport as identical twins, occasionally standing in for each other in matches (and on one occasion subbing for an entirely unrelated pair of brothers in a Birmingham Cup tie).

Perhaps Billy and Teddy’s least excellent adventure followed a cup game the latter played for Grimsby against their then bitter rivals, Sheffield Wednesday. The first match was, he recalled, “very rough”, and when both teams accused each other of fielding ineligible players it was ordered to be replayed.

“Going there a second time the feeling of the spectators ran so high against us that mud was thrown at me and an attack made on me while I was riding in a hansom cab,” Teddy said. Two weeks later Wednesday hosted Billy’s Notts County. “The remarks the crowd addressed to him would not be suitable for publication,” read one report. “During and after the match the referee, officials and players endeavoured to persuade them that Billy was Billy and not Ted, but all in vain; they would listen to nobody. At the conclusion Billy was surrounded by a mob of about 200 excited people as he was making his way to the dressing rooms. He found his way with the other players as rapidly as he could as a shower of stones were volleyed upon him.”

Diane and Rosalind Rowe

“It all began with an unwanted Christmas present,” the Rowes wrote in their book, The Twins on Table Tennis. “We were 14 years old and the gift we wanted most was a bicycle. But Daddy gave each of us a table tennis bat, ‘to keep you out of mischief’. We worked off some of our disappointment that Christmas morning by hitting a ball across the dining-room table. Soon, bicycles were forgotten. We were enjoying ourselves! Within three years we had won the doubles championship of the world.”

It is fair to say that table tennis was a bigger deal then than it is now: in 1950 Diane won both girls’ and women’s singles events at a televised tournament played in a sold-out Royal Albert Hall, and when the following year they went to Vienna and won the world championship they found international fame. They played, in Diane’s words, “like a machine, in automatic harmony”, Rosalind right-handed and Diane with her left, and collected a second world title at Wembley in 1954 (where in the final they beat another English pair including a 15-year-old called Ann Haydon; Haydon soon switched to full-sized tennis and, under her married name of Jones, won the Wimbledon singles title in 1969).

Rosalind married the doctor on the ship that took them to New Zealand in 1953 and retired at 22; Diane married the famous German player Eberhard Schöler and won mixed doubles bronze, representing West Germany, at the 1971 world championships.

Mark and Steve Waugh

The Waugh twins were natural sportspeople, and might have gone into tennis or football – they represented New South Wales in both, and in 1977 aged 11 were in the winning team of both a national schools’ football tournament (between them scoring all three of their side’s goals in the final), and a national interstate cricket tournament (Mark was captain, Steve his vice).

“We were always in the same teams, always in the same class, we lived in the same bedroom for 16 years, we shared the same clothes,” said Steve. “We lived in each other’s pockets. We went everywhere together.” Steve, the elder by four minutes, beat his brother to the Test side by five years, and when Mark eventually made his debut it was as a replacement for an out-of-form Steve – but before long, and for the best part of a decade, both were undroppable. They played 108 times together over 11 and a half years, becoming the second pair of twins to play Test cricket together, after New Zealand’s Rose and Liz Signal in 1984. The only batter in the world to outscore either Waugh during their Test careers was Sachin Tendulkar.

Mark, AKA “Junior”, was a stunning batter and phenomenal fielder, but such was Steve’s success he still laboured another nickname “Afghan” – the forgotten Waugh. “I always remember playing against this English bowler called James [aka Jimmy] Ormond,” he said once. “I was fielding at bat-pad and I said a few words to him: ‘Who’s this guy? Never seen him before. Surely he’s not one of the best 11 cricketers in England.’ At the end of the over he walked past me and said: ‘Maybe not, but at least I’m the best cricketer in my family.’”

Zdenek and Frantisek Tikal

There have been more than 200 pairs of Olympic twins but perhaps the most curious of them are the Tikals, partly because they have the rare (but not unique) distinction of having played against each other. The twins were separated at the age of 14, when their father defected from their native Czechoslovakia to Australia and took only Zdenek with him.

Frantisek went on to become a great of Czech ice hockey, winning two national titles, competing in seven world championships, and being named best defender of the tournament while winning Olympic bronze in 1964. Zdenek played at a much lower level in Melbourne’s local leagues, but when with American assistance Australia sent a team to the 1960 Winter Games he was selected – and the draw threw them against the Czechs in the group stage.

It was the first time in 12 years that the brothers had seen each other, but this was no romantic reunion: Zdenek and his teammate Ivo Vesely, who had also been born in Czechoslovakia, were remorselessly and violently targeted by their opponents, who saw them as traitors, and Zdenek was eventually forced from the ice after a vicious collision with his brother left him with torn shoulder ligaments, his tournament over.