Controversies in 1864

15 incidents documented

Middlesex County Cricket Club Founded — Cricket Comes Home to Lord's, 1864

Middlesex cricket establishment

1864-02-02

Middlesex County Cricket Club was founded on 2 February 1864 at a meeting in London, the same year in which the MCC legalised overarm bowling and John Wisden published his first Almanack. It was one of several county clubs formally constituted in the busy years of 1863–65 as English cricket reorganised itself around a county structure that would eventually evolve into a formal championship.

#overarm-era#early-county-cricket#1860s

⭐Mild

Lancashire County Cricket Club Founded — Manchester's Game Gets Organised, 1864

Lancashire cricket establishment

1864-01-12

Lancashire County Cricket Club was formally constituted at a meeting in Manchester on 12 January 1864, giving England's most cricket-passionate industrial county a formal organisational structure to match the grassroots enthusiasm that had been filling grounds at Old Trafford and elsewhere for decades. Lancashire, alongside Yorkshire, represented the great northern cricket public that William Clarke's All-England Eleven had first mobilised commercially in the 1840s.

#overarm-era#early-county-cricket#1860s

⭐Mild

Richard Daft — Nottinghamshire's Prince and England's Premier Batsman, 1860s

Nottinghamshire and All-England representative sides

1864-07-01

Richard Daft of Nottinghamshire was, in the mid-1860s, the successor to George Parr as the country's leading professional batsman — elegant, technically correct, and prolific on the rough wickets of the early county cricket era. His Trent Bridge centuries and his representative appearances for the Players against the Gentlemen defined the standard of professional batsmanship in the decade before W.G. Grace's arrival reset all comparisons.

#overarm-era#early-county-cricket#1860s

⭐Mild

Cricket in New Zealand — The Canterbury and Otago Grounds, 1860s

Canterbury, Otago and Wellington cricket clubs

1864-01-01

New Zealand cricket developed rapidly through the 1860s as the provinces of Canterbury, Otago and Wellington established permanent clubs and grounds. The Canterbury Cricket Association, founded in 1877 but preceded by informal organisations in the 1860s, and the Otago Cricket Association grew from the inter-provincial matches played from the 1860s onward; the gold rush of the 1860s in Otago brought thousands of new immigrants, many of them cricket-playing British emigrants.

#overarm-era#early-county-cricket#1860s

🏏Serious

The Throwing Controversy — Suspect Actions and the Umpire's Dilemma, 1860s

Various county and representative sides

1864-06-01

The legalisation of overarm bowling in 1864 created an immediate grey zone: how high could the arm go, and at what point did a fast delivery become an illegal throw? Through the 1860s English cricket struggled with this question as a succession of fast bowlers developed actions that umpires suspected but rarely no-balled, creating a climate of suspicion that would recur in every generation of cricket thereafter.

#overarm-era#early-county-cricket#1860s

⭐Mild

Cricket in India — Bombay's Quadrangular Begins to Take Shape, 1860s

European, Parsi and other Bombay cricket communities

1864-01-01

Cricket in Bombay through the 1860s was developing the communal structure that would eventually produce the famous Bombay Quadrangular — matches between European, Parsi, Hindu and Muslim sides that were the premier cricket events in India from the 1890s until independence. In the 1860s the key development was the Parsi cricket community's growth in strength and self-confidence, leading to their first systematic matches against the Bombay Gymkhana (the European side) and their first visit to England in 1886.

#overarm-era#early-county-cricket#1860s

⭐Mild

The Oval and Lord's — Ground Improvements Shape Victorian Cricket's Showplaces, 1860s

Surrey CCC and MCC

1864-04-01

Through the 1860s both The Oval and Lord's underwent significant improvements to their playing surfaces, pavilions and spectator facilities, reflecting the growing commercial importance of county cricket and the ambition of the MCC and Surrey CCC to provide grounds worthy of the game's premier events. The improvements established both grounds' physical forms that would be recognisable for decades.

#overarm-era#early-county-cricket#1860s

⭐Mild

Batsmen Adapt to Overarm — The Technical Revolution After 1864

English county batsmen generally

1864-10-01

The legalisation of overarm bowling in June 1864 forced a rapid recalibration of batting technique across English county cricket. The higher trajectory and sharper bounce of genuinely overarm deliveries made the forward-play orthodoxy developed against roundarm bowlers less reliable; batsmen who had thrived through the 1850s were suddenly vulnerable to a delivery that was faster, higher and harder to read. W.G. Grace's subsequent domination of overarm bowling was partly a response to this challenge — he developed a technique that worked against all bowling styles.

#overarm-era#early-county-cricket#1860s

⭐Mild

Somerset Cricket — The Western County Finds Its Feet, 1860s

Somerset and neighbouring county sides

1864-07-01

Somerset cricket in the 1860s was developing the club and ground infrastructure that would eventually support the county's formal first-class status. The Wells Cricket Club and the Taunton sides were the county's strongest in this era, and matches against visiting sides — the AEE had visited several Somerset towns — demonstrated that the county had genuine talent. Somerset CCC was formally founded in 1875; the 1860s were its formative period.

#overarm-era#early-county-cricket#1860s

⭐Mild

John Wisden Publishes the First Cricketers' Almanack — Spring 1864

n/a

1864-04-01

Retired Sussex bowler John Wisden, proprietor of a sports outfitters in Cranbourn Street, brought out the first edition of The Cricketer's Almanack in the spring of 1864. The 112-page shilling pamphlet, padded with the dates of the English Civil War and the winners of the St Leger, was a competitor to Fred Lillywhite's existing Guide and would grow into the longest-running sports annual in history.

#wisden#john-wisden#almanack

⭐Serious

MCC Legalises Overarm Bowling — Law 10 Rewritten, June 1864

n/a

1864-06-10

On 10 June 1864 the Marylebone Cricket Club rewrote Law 10 to permit a bowler to deliver the ball with his arm at any height, provided the action was not a throw. The change ended a half-century of legislative cat-and-mouse over how high a bowler could carry his hand and turned overarm — already the dominant style in practice — into the only style cricket would know.

#mcc#law-change#overarm-bowling

⭐Mild

George Parr's English XII — Tour of Australia and New Zealand, 1863-64

George Parr's English XII vs Australian and New Zealand colonial sides

1864-03-01

Two years after the Stephenson tour, the All-England Eleven captain George Parr led a second English party to Australia and added New Zealand to the itinerary for the first time. The twelve professionals, again playing against odds, lost only one of their thirteen Australian fixtures and introduced overarm bowling — legalised back home midway through their voyage — to colonial spectators who had never seen it.

#george-parr#1863-64#australia-tour

⭐Mild

Alfred Shaw's Emergence — Notts Debut and the Slow-Medium Revolution, 1864-66

Nottinghamshire vs Kent

1864-06-13

On 13 June 1864 a 21-year-old slow-medium bowler from Burton Joyce in Nottinghamshire made his first-class debut at Trent Bridge against Kent. Alfred Shaw — later 'the Emperor of Bowlers', the man who would bowl the first ball in Test cricket — had spent two seasons as a club professional at Grantham and had taken seven Notts wickets for the Colts in 1863. The 1864-66 emergence at Trent Bridge began a career that, more than any other, established the slow-medium length-and-line bowling that defined the next century of cricket.

#alfred-shaw#nottinghamshire#1864

⭐Mild

William Caffyn in Australia — The Surrey Pro who Coached Charles Bannerman, 1864-1871

Melbourne CC; Warwick Club, Sydney; New South Wales

1864-04-01

William Caffyn — the Surrey all-rounder who had toured Australia twice — emigrated permanently after the 1863-64 Parr tour and spent eight years coaching in Melbourne and Sydney. The most influential of his pupils was Charles Bannerman, who would face the first ball in Test cricket and score the first Test century. Caffyn called Bannerman 'the best bat I ever saw or coached in Australia'. By the time Caffyn returned to England in 1871, Australian cricket had a foundation of professional technique that would translate, within six years, into Test status.

#william-caffyn#australian-coaching#warwick-club

⭐Mild

Surrey's 1864 Title and Mid-Decade Decline — The End of the First Surrey Era

Surrey vs other counties

1864-09-01

Surrey, the dominant county of the 1850s, took the unofficial championship one last time in 1864 — winning eight and drawing three of eleven first-class matches — and then collapsed. The retirement of HH Stephenson, William Mortlock, Julius Caesar and Tom Lockyer combined with William Caffyn's emigration to Australia stripped the side of its core. By 1869 Surrey were largely carried by James Southerton's bowling and Ted Pooley's wicket-keeping; the recovery would not come until the early 1870s.

#surrey#the-oval#william-caffyn