Lancashire County Cricket Club


Lancashire Cricket Club represents the historic county of Lancashire in English cricket. The club has held first-class status since it was founded in 1864. Lancashire's home is Old Trafford Cricket Ground, although the team also play matches at other grounds around the county. Lancashire was a founder member of the County Championship in 1890 and has won the competition nine times. Lancashire has won 26 major honours in its history. The club's limited overs team is called Lancashire Lightning.
Lancashire was widely recognised as the Champion County four times between 1879 and 1889. It won its first two County Championship titles in the 1897 and 1904 seasons. Between 1926 and 1934, it won the championship five times. Throughout most of the inter-war period, Lancashire and its neighbours Yorkshire had the best two teams in England and the Roses Matches between them were usually the highlight of the domestic season. In 1950, Lancashire shared the title with Surrey. The County Championship was restructured in 2000 with Lancashire in the first division. They won the 2011 County Championship, a gap of 77 years since the club's last outright title in 1934.
In 1895, Archie MacLaren scored 424 in an innings for Lancashire, which remains the highest score by an Englishman in first-class cricket. Johnny Briggs, whose career lasted from 1879 to 1900, was the first player to score 10,000 runs and take 1,000 wickets for Lancashire. Ernest Tyldesley, younger brother of Johnny Tyldesley, is the club's leading run-scorer with 34,222 runs in 573 matches for Lancashire between 1909 and 1936. Fast bowler Brian Statham took a club record 1,816 wickets in 430 first-class matches between 1950 and 1968. England batsman Cyril Washbrook became Lancashire's first professional captain in 1954.
The Lancashire side of the late 1960s and early 1970s, captained by Jack Bond and featuring the West Indian batsman Clive Lloyd, was successful in limited overs cricket, winning the Sunday League in 1969 and 1970 and the Gillette Cup four times between 1970 and 1975. Lancashire won the Benson and Hedges Cup in 1984, three times between 1990 and 1996, and the Sunday League in 1989, 1998 and 1999. They won the Twenty20 Cup for the first time in 2015.

Honours

First XI honours

Cricket may not have reached Lancashire until the 18th century. As advised by the Association of Cricket Statisticians, the earliest known reference to the sport being played in the county has been found in the Manchester Journal dated Saturday, 1 September 1781. It concerned an eleven-a-side match played the previous Monday, 27 August, at Brinnington Moor between a team of printers and one representing the villages of Haughton and Bredbury, who were the winners. As Bredbury was then in Cheshire, the match is the earliest reference for that county too.
In 1816, the Manchester Cricket Club was founded and soon became the main north country rivals of Nottingham Cricket Club and Sheffield Cricket Club. On 23–25 July 1849, the Sheffield and Manchester clubs played each other at Hyde Park in Sheffield but the fixture was styled Yorkshire v Lancashire. It was the first match to involve a team using Lancashire as its name and is sometimes reckoned to have been the first Roses Match. Yorkshire won by five wickets. Teams called Yorkshire, though based on the Sheffield club, had been active since 1833. The Roses Match is one of cricket's oldest and most famous rivalries. In 1857, the Manchester club moved to Old Trafford, which has been the home of Lancashire cricket ever since.

History of the county club

Origin

On 12 January 1864, Manchester Cricket Club organised a meeting at the Queen's Hotel in Manchester for the purpose of forming a club to represent the county. Thirteen local clubs were represented: Broughton, Longsight, Manchester and Western from the Manchester area; Huyton, Liverpool and Northern from Merseyside; Accrington, Ashton, Blackburn, Oldham, Whalley and Wigan from other towns. Lancashire County Cricket Club was founded with the object of, it was said, "spreading a thorough knowledge and appreciation of the game throughout Lancashire". It was intended to stage home matches alternately at Old Trafford, Aigburth, Preston, Blackburn and at "other places to help introduce good cricket throughout the county".
The new county club played its first-ever official game at Warrington against Birkenhead Park on Wednesday, 15 June 1864 but that was not a first-class match. The first inter-county match, which was first-class, was played in 1865 at Old Trafford against Middlesex; Lancashire won the match by 62 runs, although Middlesex's V. E. Walker took all ten wickets in Lancashire's second innings.

Early successes

The early Lancashire side was reliant upon amateurs, which led to problems; although they were happy to play at Old Trafford, they were less willing to travel to away fixtures. During the early 1870s, the team was dominated by A. N. Hornby’s batting. The team's standard of cricket improved with the arrival of two professional players, Dick Barlow and Alex Watson. The impact of Barlow and Hornby was such that their batting partnership was immortalised in the poem At Lord’s by Francis Thompson. The team was further enhanced by A. G. Steel, an amateur sometimes considered second only to W. G. Grace as the country's best all rounder; Johnny Briggs, a professional from Sutton-in-Ashfield and the only player to score 10,000 runs and take 1,000 wickets for Lancashire; and wicket-keeper Dick Pilling, who in 1891 was rated by Wisden Cricketers' Almanack as the second-best wicket-keeper in the world behind Jack Blackham. As Lancashire's consistency improved, so did their support: in 1878, 28,000 over three days watched Lancashire play Gloucestershire.
The club's first success came in 1879, when the majority of the cricket press – except for Wisden – agreed that Lancashire and Nottinghamshire were joint champions. Lancashire was the champion county in 1881 and again shared the title with Nottinghamshire in 1882.
Dick Barlow carried his bat for just 5 not out in Lancashire's total of 69 in two and a half hours against Nottinghamshire on a treacherous, rain-affected Trent Bridge pitch in July 1882. Barlow and his longtime opening partner Hornby are the opening batsmen immortalised in the famous poem by Francis Thompson. In 1884, Old Trafford became the second ground, after The Oval, to stage a Test match in England. Though it rained on the first day, 12,000 spectators attended on the second; the match between England and Australia resulted in a draw.
Controversy emerged during the 1880s; Kent and Nottinghamshire objected to the bowling actions of John Crossland and George Nash. Nottinghamshire even went as far as refusing to play against Lancashire. Although the 1880s was a period of controversy and modest results for the club, it was also a time in which some club records were established. In 1885 George Kemp scored Lancashire's first century in a Roses Match. In that same year Johnny Briggs and Dick Pilling set a first-class record partnership for the tenth wicket of 173 that stood until 1899 and has not been bettered by Lancashire. The club shared the title of champions with Surrey in 1889.
The County Championship was founded in 1890, and champions were decided by points rather than the press as had happened previously. Lancashire was one of the eight founding teams of the championship along with Gloucestershire, Kent, Middlesex, Nottinghamshire, Surrey, Sussex and Yorkshire. The team was runner up in 1890 and 1891. Archie MacLaren was appointed captain in 1894, four years after making his debut whilst still captain of Harrow. In 1895 MacLaren made his record-breaking innings of 424 against Somerset at Taunton; his innings remained the highest first-class score for an Englishman, was the first first-class quadruple century, and was the highest score in first-class cricket until Bill Ponsford scored 429 in February 1923. Again, Lancashire was runner up in 1895, despite Arthur Mold taking 192 wickets in the season, a feat bettered only twice for the club. The current pavilion was constructed in 1895 and cost £10,000 ; it replaced the earlier pavilion, dating from 1857 when Old Trafford was originally built.
Lancashire won its first county championship in 1897, a productive bowling attack made up of Johnny Briggs, Willis Cuttell, Albert Hallam, and Arthur Mold took 420 wickets between them. In 1898 Lancashire bought the ground and some adjoining land from the de Traffords for £24,732. In 1902, amateur and professional players began walking onto the field side by side in a break with tradition. Lancashire won its second championship title in 1904, going undefeated throughout the season; Wisden described the season as “the brightest in the history of Lancashire cricket”. That season, James Hallows completed the feat of 1,000 runs and 100 wickets in the season. During the late 1900s and early 1910s, players such as Walter Brearley, Harry Dean, and Bill Huddleston were the mainstays of Lancashire bowling. The club began to experience financial problems during this same period; the increased popularity of other sports was blamed for the dip in attendances. In 1914, Lancashire sank to its lowest position of eleventh, whilst during World War I the pavilion was used by the Red Cross and 1,800 patients were treated there.