Cricket
Records from the 19th century suggest that there was a cricket club in existence in Birmingham by 1745, and that a cricket match was being played in Birmingham on the day that the Battle of Culloden was fought in 1746. The earliest cricket match in Birmingham for which a definite record exists took place on Monday 15 July 1751, between "Eleven of the Gentlemen of the Holte Bridgman's Club and Eleven of the Gentlemen of Mr Thomas Bellamy's Club, the most of three innings, for Twenty-Two Guineas", at Holte Bridgman's Cricket Ground, at the Apollo in Aston. Admission was 2 pence. In 1760 a "Society of Cricket Players of Birmingham" advertised in Aris's Birmingham Gazette to challenge any other team within 30 miles of the town to a game for the prize of 20 guineas.
The Birmingham and District Cricket League is the oldest cricket league in the world, having been founded in 1888.
Cricket was extremely popular in Birmingham between World War I and World War II. Records from the Sports Argus show that there were 200 teams playing cricket weekly within Birmingham in 1922, a figure which rose to 300 in 1930 and exceeded 320 in 1939. These figures do not include teams playing in competitions within individual firms – in the early 1930s the Birmingham Small Arms Company alone supported a cricket league of 14 teams.
Today County Cricket is played at the Edgbaston Cricket Ground, home to Warwickshire County Cricket Club. International test matches are also held there.
In 1882, Bournville Cricket Club was founded in Froggarts Farm on the corner of Bournville Lane and Linden Road, which is now The Old Farm Hotel. The Ground held its first county game when Worcestershire played Essex in June 1910, and in 1982 held an ICC champions trophy 3rd Place Play off when Papua New Guinea played Bangladesh.
Birmingham was the host for the first ever Cricket World Cup of either gender, a Women's Cricket World Cup in 1973. England beat Australia in the finals.
Read more about this topic: Sport In Birmingham
Famous quotes containing the word cricket:
“All cries are thin and terse;
The field has droned the summer’s final mass;
A cricket like a dwindled hearse
Crawls from the dry grass.”
—Richard Wilbur (b. 1921)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)