The MInor Counties Championship 1900

9 THE BOOK The Match Scores The scores are presented in the same format as used in the publications covering the five earlier years, with the methodology remaining unchanged. As in 1897,1898 and 1899, only two original scorebooks have been found and they cover the same counties ñ Durham and Hertfordshire. As a consequence, newspapers have remained the main source and once again over one hundred have been consulted in researching the scores for this book. Where an obvious newspaper is not listed amongst the sources at the foot of a match score, this is likely to be because it has not been possible to gain access to the volume at the British Newspaper Library at Colindale due to its fragile condition, or because it is not held either there or at the relevant county library or record office. Again, the competition continued to receive very limited attention in Cricket , the leading magazine for the sport at the time. It gave the scores of the representative matches against the MCC and the West Indian tourists, but only one full score of a championship match was included - that between Surrey 2nd XI and Yorkshire 2nd XI at The Oval. Missing Details The bowling analysis is not known for the second innings of Match 4 Glamorgan v Wiltshire at Swansea when Glamorgan scored 54-2 wickets. It has not proved possible to reconstruct this analysis from the Wiltshire averages. There are no instances in the match scores where runs batting add incorrectly. However, there are two cases where runs bowling in the match scores do not add correctly. One is Match 54 Bedfordshire versus Oxfordshire at Luton where the Oxfordshire first innings bowling is 1 run short. The other is Match 66 Oxfordshire v Buckinghamshire at Oxford where the Oxfordshire bowling in the Buckinghamshire first innings is 10 runs short. In the match scores the symbol * indicates captain and + wicket-keeper. The Averages The averages are given in two forms ñ by county and by player. In both cases the players are listed in alphabetical order. 355 players took part in championship matches, compared with 305 in 1899. The averages continue to be calculated for all the championship matches. This means that they include not just the fourteen teams that qualified for the Championship, but also Yorkshire 2nd XI that did not, but whose games counted as championship matches for their opponents ñ Staffordshire and Surrey 2nd XI. In the averages, the symbol * indicates a not out innings, + denotes a player making his debut for his team in 1900, of which there are 154, and a name in bold denotes a player making his final appearance for his team in a championship match in 1900, of which there are 112. The career records of all the 112 cricketers making their last appearance for their team in 1900 are also given, both in a separate section after the player alphabetical averages for the season and with the county averages.