Lancashire Cricket celebrates 159th birthday
Lancashire County Cricket Club celebrates its 159th birthday today, after the County Club was formed by leading clubs in the county at a meeting in the Queens Hotel, Manchester on the 12th January 1864.
Lancashire have played at Emirates Old Trafford since then and, in 1865, played their inaugural first-class match, beating Middlesex at the venue.
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, a period where the county was recognised as the champion county four times between 1879 and 1889. When the County Championship was officially founded in December 1889, Lancashire was one of eight clubs to feature in the competition’s first season in 1890 and went on to win two County Championship titles in 1897 and 1904.
In 1895 Archie MacLaren scored 424 in an innings for Lancashire, which remains the highest score by an Englishman in first-class cricket. Ernest Tyldesley is the club’s leading run-scorer with 34,222 runs in 573 matches for Lancashire between 1909 and 1936. while legendary England fast bowler Brian Statham took 1,816 wickets in 430 first-class matches between 1950 and 1968 which remains a club record unlikely to be bettered.
Between 1926 and 1934, Lancashire won the County Championship five times – including a hat-trick between 1926-28 – but would not claim the title again until 1950, when it was shared with Surrey. Lancashire next won the County Championship in a dramatic finale to the 2011 season, their first outright title success for 77 years.
Lancashire are the most successful one-day team in English cricket, founded on the side of the late 1960s and early 1970s that won the Sunday League in 1969 and 1970 and the Gillette Cup four times between 1970 and 1975. They won the Benson and Hedges Cup in 1984, before the ‘Team of the Ninties’ enjoyed a golden decade.
Lancashire became the first team to do the ‘double’ of Lord’s cup final wins when they won both the B&H Cup and NatWest Trophy Finals in 1990, a feat they repeated in 1996. Another B&H Cup success in 1995 and NatWest Trophy win in 1998, along with three Sunday League in 1989, 1998 and 1999 put the seal on a golden era.
The County Championship was restructured in 2000 with Lancashire in the first division. They were relegated in 2004 but promoted again in 2005. In 2011, Lancashire won the County Championship but since have ‘yo-yo’d’ between the two divisions; relegated in 2012, promoted as Division 2 Champions in 2013, but then relegated again in 2014 and promoted again in 2015.
In the T20 competition, Lancashire Lightning have the most wins of all the English counties since the tournament commenced in 2003. They have reached two finals, losing to Somerset in 2005 and then narrowly to Birmingham Bears in 2014, but it was third time lucky for the Club after the side beat Northants Steelbacks in the final at Edgbaston to lift the trophy for the first time in 2015.
