Match-Fixing Suspicions in County Cricket — The Dark Underbelly of the 1860s Game

The collapse of the systematic corruption associated with the old country-house patronage in the 1830s had reduced but not eliminated gambling on cricket. By the 1860s the betting was informal and dispersed rather than organised — harder to manage or to police.

The formal county cricket structure of the 1860s — still without a championship, dependent on match fees and gate money — created economic incentives for manipulation. A professional who received a guarantee of £10 from a bookmaker to perform poorly in a specific match earned more than his match fee for the fixture; the temptation was real. Contemporary cricket memoirs are careful about naming names but less careful about suggesting that some county results in this period were not entirely honest. The Bell's Life correspondent, the most authoritative cricket journalist of the day, wrote in 1866 of 'certain matches whose results gave rise to comment which it would be improper to set down in print.' Match-fixing in cricket was not new — the 1817 William Lambert affair had established the precedent — and it would not be old: the scandals of the 1990s and 2000s showed that the incentives never disappeared.