Oxford University Cricket Club (now closely linked to the Oxford MCC Universities (MCCU) team which incorporates Oxford Brookes University, but retaining its independence) is a first-class cricket team, representing the University of Oxford. It plays its home games at the University Parks in Oxford, England. For Oxford's first-class fixtures other than those against Cambridge University they play as Oxford MCCU (known as Oxford Universities Centre of Cricketing Excellence (UCCE) prior to the 2010 season).
Cricketers who have competed in the first-class four day Varsity Match against Cambridge University are eligible for an Oxford Blue.
The earliest reference to cricket at Oxford University is the year 1729; no less an authority than Dr Samuel Johnson was a student and later stated that he played cricket there.
Oxford University made its first class debut in 1827 when it played Cambridge University Cricket Club in the first ever University Match, which is the oldest 1st Class Fixture in the world.
Famous quotes containing the words oxford university, oxford, university, cricket and/or club:
“Christianity as an organized religion has not always had a harmonious relationship with the family. Unlike Judaism, it kept almost no rituals that took place in private homes. The esteem that monasticism and priestly celibacy enjoyed implied a denigration of marriage and parenthood.”
—Beatrice Gottlieb, U.S. historian. The Family in the Western World from the Black Death to the Industrial Age, ch. 12, Oxford University Press (1993)
“I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember, the place is so beautiful. One almost expects the people to sing instead of speaking. It is all ... like an opera.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“Poetry presents indivisible wholes of human consciousness, modified and ordered by the stringent requirements of form. Prose, aiming at a definite and concrete goal, generally suppresses everything inessential to its purpose; poetry, existing only to exhibit itself as an aesthetic object, aims only at completeness and perfection of form.”
—Richard Harter Fogle, U.S. critic, educator. The Imagery of Keats and Shelley, ch. 1, University of North Carolina Press (1949)
“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 barriers of conventionality have been raised so high, and so strangely cemented by long existence, that the only hope of overthrowing them exists in the union of numbers linked together by common opinion and effort ... the united watchword of thousands would strike at the foundation of the false system and annihilate it.”
—Mme. Ellen Louise Demorest 1824–1898, U.S. women’s magazine editor and woman’s club movement pioneer. Demorest’s Illustrated Monthly and Mirror of Fashions, p. 203 (January 1870)