Club History
The early history of Gloucestershire is dominated by the Grace family, most notably W G Grace, who was the club's original captain and held that post until his departure for London in 1899. His brother E M Grace, although still an active player, was the original club secretary. With the Grace brothers and Billy Midwinter in their team, Gloucestershire won three Champion County titles in the 1870s.
Since then Gloucestershire's fortunes have been mixed and they have never won the official County Championship. They struggled in the pre-war years of the County Championship because their best batsmen, apart from Gilbert Jessop and briefly Charlie Townsend, were very rarely available. The bowling, except when Townsend did sensational things on sticky wickets in late 1895 and late 1898, was very weak until George Dennett emerged – then it had the fault of depending far too much on him. Wally Hammond, who still holds many of the county's batting records formed part of an occasionally strong inter-war team, although the highest championship finish during this period was second in 1930 and 1931, when Charlie Parker and Tom Goddard formed a devastating spin attack.
Outstanding players since the war include Tom Graveney, "Jack" Russell and overseas players Mike Procter, Zaheer Abbas and Courtney Walsh.
Gloucestershire enjoyed a run of success in one-day cricket in the late 1990s and early 2000s. They won several titles mainly under the captaincy of Mark Alleyne whilst being coached by John Bracewell.
The club's captain for the 2006 season, Jon Lewis, became the first Gloucestershire player for nearly 10 years to play for England at Test Match level, when he was picked to represent his country in the Third Test against Sri Lanka at Trent Bridge in June 2006. His figures in the first innings were 3–68, including a wicket in his very first over in Test cricket, and he was widely praised for his debut performance.
Gloucestershire reached the final of the 2007 Twenty20 Cup, where they narrowly lost to Kent.
Read more about this topic: Gloucestershire County Cricket Club
Famous quotes containing the words club and/or history:
“I think there ought to be a club in which preachers and journalists could come together and have the sentimentalism of the one matched with the cynicism of the other. That ought to bring them pretty close to the truth.”
—Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971)
“If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of a completely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)