Minor Counties Championship 1895

6 10) The list of members of the Association was given as Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, Cheshire, Cornwall, Devon, Durham, Glamorgan, Herefordshire, Hertfordshire, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, Oxfordshire, Shropshire, Staffordshire, Wiltshire and Worcestershire. Subsequently, Cheshire failed to arrange sufficient qualifying matches, but Norfolk joined the Association and qualified for the competition, and the newly formed Berkshire club also joined the Association. For the first few years of the competition, even though it was run by the Minor Counties Cricket Association, it was widely known as the ‘second-class counties championship’ or the ‘county championship – second division’. In this book, to avoid possible confusion, it is referred to throughout as the ‘Minor Counties Championship’. THE 1895 MINOR COUNTIES CHAMPIONSHIP In all, seven teams – Bedfordshire, Durham, Hertfordshire, Norfolk, Oxfordshire, Staffordshire and Worcestershire – qualified for inclusion in the table by arranging the required 8 matches. Another seven – Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, Cheshire, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire and Wiltshire – did not, but were involved in matches against the ‘first’ seven that counted in the table as championship games for their opponents. The launch of the competition was poorly reported nationally. None of the full scores is found in the non-specialist national press, and Cricket , the sport’s main specialist publication at the time, did not reproduce a single full score. Even at the regional and local level, while scores were often given in newspapers, these were often incomplete, and few reports would include any reference to the matches being for the new Championship. There was even uncertainty as to who had won the Championship, with Durham, Norfolk and Worcestershire all equal on three points. James Lillywhite’s Cricketers’ Annual gave Worcestershire as winners on the basis that they had won one more game than Durham and Norfolk. Wisden gave Durham and Norfolk as joint winners because the “official ruling of the MCC, however, as applied to the first-class counties, would divide the honour of first place between Norfolk and Durham whose records are identical, while their proportion of wins to matches finished is fractionally better than that of Worcestershire”. Cricket in its table gave all three teams as sharing the title. The MCC was invited to rule on the matter but, probably wisely, declined to do so on the grounds that the competition was not under its auspices. It was eventually agreed that the title be shared by all three teams. If Durham and Norfolk were disappointed by the decision, as perhaps they had some reason to be, given that the Association had formally adopted the rule that the system of scoring for the competition table should be the same as for the first-class counties championship, no evidence has been found to suggest it explains their failure to arrange sufficient matches to qualify for the competition in 1896! In 1895, overs were of five balls not six. In addition, under the rules for two-day matches, the follow-on was mandatory if the team batting first had a lead of 80 runs or more. Each team provided an umpire. Though the umpires for many matches have not been identified, it is likely that the county umpires would have officiated in most of these games.