Chapter Seven Clash of Titans Canterbury Week’s fixtures took their modern shape in 1882 but the year marked other watersheds. The county club secretaries began to meet regularly and in May the magazine Cricket was established by Charles Alcock as a weekly record of the game. Alcock was a remarkable figure. He had been secretary of Surrey since 1872 and editor of James Lillywhite’s Cricketers’ Annual and John Lillywhite’s Cricketers’ Companion , which were to merge in 1886. Cricket gave extensive coverage of all English first-class matches, details of overseas tours, items of gossip and weekly profiles. It existed until 1914 and performed a major role in promoting both the sport and its players. For the county game was on the rise. In 1873 it had been agreed that cricketers could represent only one county per season, the criteria being birth or residence – regulations regarded by some as the start of an official Championship. But fixtures were few, far between and somewhat hit or miss. Surrey played 14 inter-county matches that season, Middlesex three and Derbyshire only two. Holiday engagements had been spasmodic: Yorkshire and Kent at Hyde Park, Sheffield in 1849, Cambridgeshire-Surrey in 1861 and so on. Curiously Derbyshire, one of the poor relations of county cricket, were in the vanguard. Sixteen of Derbyshire beat Eleven of Nottinghamshire at Trent Bridge in 1874, a defeat avenged by Notts a year later in an eleven-a-side game, but a burgeoning East Midlands’ Whitsuntide event was nipped in the bud. The 1876 fixture should have been played at Derby but Nottinghamshire wanted it at Trent Bridge. Derbyshire refused and the fixture was cancelled, Derbyshire meeting Hampshire instead. Derbyshire found some consolation with matches against the Australians in 1880, when large crowds saw Spofforth take 13 wickets and in 1884 (Spofforth 12 victims) when the tourists won by an innings. The value of the Australians as an attraction in those times must be placed in context. In 1880 it was late spring before anyone knew for certain that they were coming and at one time they had to actually advertise for fixtures. Yorkshire (1879) and Kent (1881) visited the bleak County Ground at the Derby Racecourse at Whit. August Bank Holiday opponents were provided by Lancashire at Chesterfield’s Saltergate in 1874 and Yorkshire at Derby in 1878 and 1881. Elsewhere sets of August fixtures began to emerge, Surrey meeting Sussex from 1877 and Gloucestershire entertaining the 1880 Australians. Then in 1882 a significant step was taken. The secretaries of Nottinghamshire and Surrey agreed that the counties should meet over both the holiday periods. Matches between Surrey and Notts dwarfed all other county rivalries in the 19th century and the 1882 fixtures laid a cornerstone of the Championship programme. For 84 years Whitsuntide found Surrey at Trent Bridge, with Notts at The Oval during the August Bank Holiday. Only the war years of 1914-18 and 1939-45 intervened until the tradition was broken after the Trent Bridge match of 1966. The teams had first met in 1851 and high quality cricket was sometimes 27