Worcestershire County Cricket Club
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Worcestershire County Cricket Club is one of the 18 major county clubs which make up the English domestic cricket structure, representing the historic county of Worcestershire. Its limited overs team is called the Worcestershire Royals, although unofficially the county is known by some fans as "the Pears".
The club is based at New Road, Worcester.
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[edit] Honours
- County Championship (5) - 1964, 1965, 1974, 1988, 1989
- Division Two (1) - 2003
- Gillette/NatWest/C&G Trophy (1) - 1994
- Sunday/National League (3) - 1971, 1987, 1988
- Twenty20 Cup (0) -
- Benson & Hedges Cup (1) - 1991
- Minor Counties Championship (3) - 1896, 1897, 1898; shared (1) - 1895
[edit] Second XI honours
- Second XI Championship (3) - 1962, 1963, 1982; shared (0) -
- Second XI Trophy (1) - 2004
[edit] History
[edit] Earliest cricket
Cricket must have reached Worcestershire by the 18th century but surprisingly the earliest reference to cricket in the county is as late as 1829.
A match on 28 August 1844 at Hartlebury Common between Worcestershire and Shropshire is the earliest known instance of a county team in Worcestershire. Two years later, XXII of Worcestershire played William Clarke's All-England Eleven at Powick Hams.
[edit] Origin of the club
Worcestershire CCC was formed on 4 March 1865 at the Star Hotel in Worcester.
The club owes much to Paul Foley who was from a family of iron masters in Stourbridge. He also owned an agricultural estate at Stoke Edith in Herefordshire. He became involved with the club in the 1880s and helped to establish the Minor Counties Championship which began in 1895. Worcestershire shared the inaugural title with Durham and Norfolk before winning outright in 1896, 1897 and 1898.
With this success behind it, the club applied for first-class status and entered the County Championship in 1899. Worcestershire CCC played its initial first-class match versus Yorkshire CCC on 4, 5 & 6 May 1899.
[edit] The first-class county
The inclusion of Worcestershire increased the County Championship to 15 teams. At first they performed moderately despite the superb batting of Tip Foster, who could rarely play after 1901. Weak bowling on perfect New Road pitches was responsible for this, but in 1907 when Tip Foster played regularly for three months their batting, considering the difficulty of the pitches, was among the finest of any county team. Their best performance that year was an innings of 567 on a somewhat difficult pitch against Fielder and Blythe of Kent CCC. After that year, however, the batting was never strong enough to make up for woefully weak bowling.
Worcestershire was so weak the club could not compete in the Championship in 1919, and their form in 1920 - when they lost three successive games by an innings and over 200 runs - was probably the worst of any county side. Their form, with one remarkable exception, was woeful up to the early thirties. Fred Root, one of the first exponents of leg theory bowling, took over 1,500 wickets for the county and was a Test standard player in an otherwise fourth-rate team. In Cyril Walters and the Nawab of Pataudi the team acquired its first class batsmen since the Fosters, but both had to give up the game after playing brilliantly in 1933 - when the bowling was briefly very weak.
The emergence of Dick Howorth and Reg Perks in the 1930s, however, was built up so well that by 1947 Worcestershire were sufficiently strong in bowling to be competitive at county level even if their batting was not adequate for high honours. Roly Jenkins, with 183 wickets in 1949, gave them briefly the best attack in county cricket, but they soon declined again and their form in the 1950s was indifferent at best.
Their first period of great success came in the 1960s under the Presidency of Sir George Dowty and the captaincy of Don Kenyon, when the county won two County Championships thanks to the achievements of such players as Norman Gifford, Tom Graveney, Jack Flavell, Len Coldwell and Basil D'Oliveira. The following decade, the New Zealander Glenn Turner was instrumental in Worcestershire's third championship. And in the 1980s, the prodigious batting feats of Graeme Hick and the arrival of Ian Botham paved the way for two more county titles.
In 2006, Worcestershire won promotion to the first division of the Championship on the last day of the season by beating Northamptonshire while their rivals for second promotion spot, Essex, lost to Leicestershire.
[edit] 2006 players
- Note: The following players made at least one appearance for Worcestershire during the 2006 season.
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Captain Batsmen
All-rounders |
Wicket-keeper Bowlers |
[edit] Club captains
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[edit] Notable past players
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Batsmen
All-rounders
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Wicket-keepers
Bowlers
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[edit] County caps awarded
- Note: Worcestershire no longer award traditional caps, instead awarding "colours" on a player's Championship debut.
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[edit] Grounds
This section gives details of every venue at which Worcestershire have hosted at least one match at first-class or List A level. Figures show the number of Worcestershire matches only played at the grounds listed, and do not include abandoned games. Note that the locations given are current; in some cases grounds now in other counties lie within the traditional boundaries of Worcestershire. The table is correct to the end of the 2006 season.
Haden Hill Park in Old Hill, West Midlands, was due to host a Benson & Hedges Cup match in 1988. However, this was abandoned without a ball being bowled and no other major cricket has been played at the ground, so it is not included in the table.
| Name of ground | Location | First-class span | Worcs f-c matches | List A span | Worcs LA matches |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| War Memorial Ground, Amblecote | Stourbridge, West Midlands | 1905-1981 | 61 | 1969-1982 | 3 |
| Bournville Cricket Ground | Bournville, Birmingham | 1910-1911 | 2 | N/A | 0 |
| Chain Wire Club Ground | Stourport-on-Severn, Worcestershire | 1980 | 1 | N/A | 0 |
| Chester Road North Ground | Kidderminster, Worcestershire | 1921-2005 | 64 | 1969-2001 | 3[1] |
| Evesham Cricket Club Ground | Evesham, Worcestershire | 1951 | 1 | N/A | 0 |
| New Road (County Ground) | Worcester | 1899-2006 | 1,052[2] | 1963-2006 | 404[3] |
| Racecourse Ground | Hereford | 1919-1983 | 5[4] | 1983-1987 | 3 |
| Seth Somers Park | Halesowen, West Midlands | 1964-1969 | 2 | N/A | 0 |
| Tipton Road | Dudley, West Midlands | 1911-1971 | 88 | 1969-1977 | 14 |
[edit] Records
[edit] First-class
- Highest team total: 696/8 declared vs Somerset, Worcester, 2005
- Lowest team total: 24 vs Yorkshire, Huddersfield, 1903
- Highest individual innings: 405* by Graeme Hick vs Somerset, Taunton, 1988
- Best bowling: 9-23 by Fred Root vs Lancashire, Worcester, 1933
[edit] List A
- Highest team total: 404/3 in 60 overs vs Devon, Worcester, 1987
- Lowest team total: 70 all out in 22 overs vs Gloucestershire, Worcester, 2002
- Highest individual innings: 180* by Tom Moody vs Surrey, The Oval, 1994
- Best bowling: 7-19 by Neal Radford vs Bedfordshire, Bedford, 1991
[edit] See also
[edit] Notes
- ^ Four other List A matches, all involving Worcestershire Cricket Board, have been played at Kidderminster.
- ^ One other first-class match, a 1972 England v Rest of England Test trial, has been played at New Road.
- ^ Three One-Day Internationals have also been played at New Road: West Indies v Zimbabwe in the 1983 World Cup, and Australia v Scotland and Sri Lanka v Zimbabwe in the 1999 World Cup. The 2003 C&G Trophy game between Worcestershire Cricket Board and Worcestershire is included in this figure, although it was technically a Worcs CB home fixture.
- ^ One other first-class match, between HK Foster's XI and the Australian Imperial Forces, has been played at the Racecourse Ground.
[edit] References
- A Social History of English Cricket by Derek Birley
- Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians - various publications
- Cricket: History of its Growth and Development by Rowland Bowen
- From the Weald to the World by Peter Wynne-Thomas (PWT)
- Hamlyn A-Z of Cricket Records by Peter Wynne-Thomas
- Playfair Cricket Annual : various issues
- Scores & Biographies by Arthur Haygarth (SBnnn)
- The Cricketer magazine (Cktr)
- Wisden Cricketers Almanack (annual): various issues
- Grounds in England from CricketArchive. Retrieved 9 December 2006.
[edit] External links
| English first-class cricket clubs |
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Derbyshire | Durham | Essex | Glamorgan | Gloucestershire | Hampshire | Kent | Lancashire | Leicestershire | Middlesex | Northamptonshire | Nottinghamshire | Somerset | Surrey | Sussex | Warwickshire | Worcestershire | Yorkshire |
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MCC | Cambridge UCCE | Durham UCCE | Loughborough UCCE | Oxford UCCE |
