Lives in Cricket No 19 - Frank Sugg

Chapter Four Playing for Yorkshire and Derbyshire Frank Sugg played in the County Championship for 17 seasons and appeared in 239 county matches, out of his total of 305 first-class matches. He played for England a couple of times, but it was as a county cricketer that he made his reputation. Frank’s career spanned significant developments in the organisation of the Championship. In its early days, it was an informal, loosely organised affair involving a varying number of counties and fixtures, no settled way of deciding the winner of the Championship and no player qualification rules. The first steps towards a more satisfactory competition were the adoption in June 1873, on the initiative of the Surrey club, of rules on the qualification of players to represent a particular county in first-class matches. These qualification rules are important in the Frank Sugg story for in the space of five seasons he was to represent three first-class counties, Yorkshire, Derbyshire and Lancashire. This was so rare a circumstance 28 that it is worth setting out the rules in full: 1 No cricketer, whether amateur or professional, shall play for more than one county during the same season. 2 Every cricketer born in one county and residing in another shall be free to choose at the commencement of each season for which of those counties he will play, and shall, during that season, play for one county only. 3 A cricketer shall be qualified to play for any county in which he is residing and has resided for the previous two years, or a cricketer may elect to play for the county in which his family home is, so long as it remains open to him as an occasional residence. 28 28 In fact, Frank Sugg was the fourth player to have appeared for three different first-class counties under these provisions.