Lives in Cricket No 19 - Frank Sugg

to the identity of Yorkshire cricket right up to 1992, when it was finally abandoned, that some explanation of how the convention came to be ignored in Frank’s case is needed. According to Frank, he owed his selection to the strong recommendation of Mr H.Stratford, a member of the county committee. At this time, Bramall Lane was the headquarters of the Yorkshire club and Sheffield members dominated the Yorkshire committee. Indeed, for the first twenty years of the club’s existence, committee members were exclusively from Sheffield; with reason, the administration of the club was dubbed the ‘Sheffield monopoly’. It was not until 1883 that representatives of Bradford, Dewsbury, Halifax, Huddersfield, Hull, Leeds and York were admitted to the committee and even then Sheffield members continued to be in the majority. Committee-member Stratford was one of them, and he must have known Frank personally. Presumably he was keen that a promising cricketer like Frank Sugg, who had spent all but his infancy in Sheffield and learned his cricket in the town, should not be lost to the county on the technicality that he was born outside its boundary when his father paid ‘a chance visit’, as Frank put it, to Ilkeston. An intriguing footnote to this account is that Walter Sugg is another player born outside the county who played for Yorkshire, albeit a single match in 1881 and therefore before Frank’s appearances. He was a competent cricketer but not in the same class as his younger brother. How Walter came to join the band of ‘foreigners’ who played for Yorkshire is not known. It seems most unlikely that any member of the Committee would have taken up his cause in the way Mr Stratford did for Frank. Perhaps the reason is no more complicated than that the convention was applied less rigorously in the county club’s early years. It is worth adding that, with the exception of Lord Hawke, few of the ‘foreigners’ played more than a handful of games for Yorkshire. Frank Sugg made his debut in a year of change for Yorkshire as in 1883 Lord Hawke (as he became in 1887) finally took over the captaincy from Tom Emmett under whom his lordship had chosen to play in the previous season when available, ‘to pick up a few wrinkles’ as he put it. Tom Emmett was an irrepressible cricketer. An excellent batsman and a fine left-arm quick bowler, his enjoyment of the game was there for all to see. He was a great favourite with the crowd. But Tom Emmett was not a thinking cricketer, nor was he a leader. The team included some talented 30 Playing for Yorkshire and Derbyshire