Nottinghamshire were the first county side to dominate English cricket, winning outright or sharing the County Championship title eleven times in the 1870s and 1880s. Trouble was, the County Championship in those days wasn’t much of a championship at all, and when it did become a proper competition along came Surrey to steal Nottinghamshire’s thunder.
Though a championship of sorts had first been contested in 1865, by 1870 the regular county fixtures numbered just twenty-two. Eventually, in 1872, a meeting was held in London at which nine county representatives thrashed out some basic rules to govern the championships. It’s interesting to note that the driving force behind this meeting was the secretary of Surrey, a man who we last met in chapter 22. Charles Alcock had been the brains behind the introduction of the Football Association Cup the previous year, a tournament specifically designed to add some spice to the football season, and now here he was hoping to do something similar for cricket.
Alcock hosted a further meeting of the nine counties at the Oval in April 1873. Present were representatives from Derbyshire, Gloucestershire, Kent, Lancashire, Middlesex, Nottinghamshire, Surrey, Sussex and Yorkshire. When the meeting broke up they had all agreed on the following rules:
1. That no cricketer, whether amateur or professional, shall play for more than one county during the season.
2. Every cricketer born in one county and residing in another shall be free to choose at the commencement of each season for which of those counties he will play, and shall, during that season, play for that county only.
3. A cricketer shall be qualified to play for any county in which he is residing and has resided for the previous two years, or a cricketer may elect to play for the county in which his family home is, so long as it remains open to him as a place of residence.
4. That should any question arise as to the residential question, the same should be left to the discretion of the Marylebone Club.
5. That a copy of these rules be sent to the Marylebone Club, with a request that they be adopted by the club.
Perfect. So cricket had its own form of the FA Cup. Well, no, not exactly. The nine protagonists had overlooked one rather important point – how exactly the winner would be decided. So the press took it upon themselves to issue a merit table at the end of each season, awarding the championship to the side that lost the fewest matches. From 1887 onwards the press adopted a new system, awarding sides one point for a win and half a point for a draw. This was the same year, incidentally, that Derbyshire dropped out of the championship, exasperated at a shambolic competition that saw them play six matches that season compared with Surrey’s sixteen. And this was the inherent problem with the championship – not unlike the wicket at Lord’s, it lacked shape and consistency.
Fortunately that all changed in 1889, the year Lancashire, Nottinghamshire and Surrey produced a three-way tie. The county secretaries met and formulated a new system of awarding points: losses to be deducted from victories and drawn matches to be ignored. This, declared Wisden, was the moment the ‘now officially recognized competition for the championship’ began.
Surrey won the inaugural championship title under the new rules, and in 1891 Somerset were invited to join the competition. But they, like the other seven counties, were in thrall to Surrey, who went on to claim a further four titles in the five seasons that followed.
In Thomas Bowley, George Lohmann, John Sharpe and Bill Lockwood, Surrey had a quartet of bowlers too good for the rest of the country. Three of the four were outsiders, enticed south by Charles Alcock, who did so much to turn Surrey into the dominant side of the late nineteenth century. ‘It must have been a bitter business for the men of Notts to watch the success of Bowley, Sharpe and Lockwood, all of them Nottingham born,’ mused Harry Altham in 1926. ‘But allowed by the home authorities to drift South in search of the regular employment that they could not find at Trent Bridge.’
Nottinghamshire, so imperious in the early unofficial days of the County Championship, didn’t win their first official title until 1907. By then the competition had been bolstered by the addition of Essex, Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Warwickshire and Hampshire in 1895, the inclusion of Worcestershire four years after that date and the admission in 1905 of Northamptonshire. Glamorgan would join in 1921, and seventy years later Durham became the eighteenth county to join.
The nine protagonists had overlooked how exactly the winner would be decided
The championship today is divided into two divisions, the system of points scoring a world away from what they decided at the Oval in 1893. But Nottinghamshire fans will feel a sense of satisfaction that in the last ten years they’ve won the championship twice, and Surrey haven’t at all.