Great Cricket Matches 1772-1800

The time has come to seek to draw all this work together and put it into print. The result is a collection of 237 ‘great’ matches. The great majority of these featured in Scores and Biographies , but every one has been checked and reviewed and in some cases, very significant alterations have been made that may well disconcert more conservative readers. Nevertheless, every change is traced back to sources as close as possible to the time and place of the match in question, and where sources differ (as they almost always do, if only in detail), reasons are given for preferring one to another. No one is more aware than the compilers of this book of the immense amount of work that historians and statisticians have put in to recording and researching this fascinating period of the game’s evolution. This is a process that is still going on, and to which readers are encouraged to contribute. We hope that agreeing a list of ‘great’ matches will help to promote interest in and understanding of the period, besides bringing to fruition a project of match classification that inspired the Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians (ACS) from its foundation. Classification of the matches The following sections set out the reasoning behind the classification of the 237 ‘great’ matches presented in this book. They refer to, and draw substantially from, an article that appeared in the ACS’s journal, the Cricket Statistician , in March 2009. The classification of eighteenth-century matches must be seen in the context of the classification of major cricket more generally. This is an issue that has concerned statisticians ever since the emergence of the concept of ‘first-class cricket’ as a distinct and definable body of matches. The term ‘first-class cricket’ had acquired this specialised meaning long before it was officially defined by the Imperial Cricket Conference (as it then was) in 1947, but the ICC specifically stated that its definition was not to apply retrospectively. For matches before 1947, accordingly, statisticians had to arrive at their own definition. This was not so daunting a prospect as it might appear, because the overwhelming majority of possible matches were part of recognised first-class tournaments, or were ruled on by national boards or MCC, or were the subject of general agreement among statisticians about their inclusion or exclusion. For a stubborn minority of marginal games, however, no such consensus emerged and practice varied between statisticians. One of the founding aims of the ACS was to agree a list of first-class matches so that statisticians should have a common basis for their work. This exercise was first carried back to 1864 and then extended to 1801, although for the earlier period the matches were described as ‘important’ because the term ‘first-class’ was not in use at that time. The ACS published guides setting out the details of its approach to match classification in all the cricketing countries. For the British Isles, there were two guides, one covering matches since 1864 and the other, all earlier games. A Guide to Important Cricket Matches Played in the British Isles 1707-1863 , published in 1981, included a list of ‘important’ matches played between 1801 and 1863, with extensive notes on the issues involved and the various teams. It did not, however, attempt to classify 18th-century cricket in the same way, explaining that it was separated from later cricket by a ‘very definite diminution of matches during the first twenty years of the 19th century’ and adding that because so many 18th-century scores are missing, ‘it is much more difficult to gauge the standard of the players’. Accordingly, the Guide included a list of 18th-century matches but did not classify them. 13