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Older readers may remember scoring runs with a Frank Sugg cricket bat or kicking a Frank Sugg football. Younger readers may find such implements, or even a model boat bearing his name ‘in the attic’. His cricket and football annuals are collectors’ items. Sugg (1862-1933) was born in Ilkeston, Derbyshire, but spent his formative years in Sheffield. A grammar school boy, he decided to forgo a legal career to become a professional cricketer, in breach of Victorian convention. After an unsuccessful start in first-class cricket with Yorkshire, he joined Derbyshire but later moved across the Pennines, where he played as a hard-hitting batsman, a ‘smiter’, for Lancashire and, in 1888, tw...
The pressures and demands of professionalism and commercialization have transformed Britain's sports. At the end of the 20th century sports have been packaged and marketed as mass entertainment for a national or even international audience. This volume explores different facets of this phenomenon.
Albert Neilson Hornby (1847-1925) was a sporting legend, captaining England and Lancashire at cricket and England at rugby union. He was also a useful footballer, appearing for Blackburn Rovers, and was a keen boxer and hurdler. He regularly rode to hounds and was a decent shot. He went to Oxford University but lasted only a few weeks, preferring scorebooks to text books and neither did he fancy joining his father’s lucrative milling business, which was based in his home town of Blackburn. But academia and the commercial world’s losses were very much cricket’s gains and the man known as ‘Monkey’ for his diminutive size as a youngster and his hyper-active demeanour carved out one of...
Johnny Briggs was simply the most popular player Lancashire had ever had; a popularity that spread through the country and indeed the cricketing world. He was a comedian and a joker on and off the field but he suffered from depression. Professional cricketer at the age of 13 years. Played for Lancashire at the age of 16 years 236 days. First bowler to take 100 test wickets. First cricketer to complete a test century and take a test hat-trick; and is the only player to do so in England and Australia test matches. Walk-up (as opposed to a run-up) of 2 steps. Timed at 44 seconds for a 5-ball over. Bowled a record 630 balls in a match in 1897 at Old Trafford. Made 14,002 runs (18.27), 10 centuries, took 259 catches and 2,212 wickets (15.95) in his career. Suffered from epilepsy. Died in Cheadle Royal Lunatic Asylum not long after his 39th birthday.
Cricket, in its modern formulation, was in the ascendant as a national sport from early Victorian times to the immediate post-World War II years. That corresponded, roughly, to a hundred or so years span in which the working and middle classes were most distinctively identified – and yet were most solidly united in values and attitudes. This curious amalgam of cross-class ‘cultural integration’ characterised cricket then, most notably in the ‘Gentlemen and Players’ convention but also in recreational cricket and among what was in those days the huge spectatorship for cricket. County cricket, especially, with its unusual combine of the plebeian professional and the bourgeois amateur, is a classic example of how an aspiring working class and an earnest middle class contrived to find common ground, and even some mutual respect, without ever disturbing the overt social barriers. In cricket, as in society at large, there was ‘class peace’ rather than class war.
All the highlights of 150 editions of Wisden Cricketers' Almanack
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In an Edwardian era of cricketing giants like WG Grace and Archie MacLaren, little Johnny Briggs (1862-1902) stood tall despite his diminutive stature. He was one of Lancashire and England’s most popular and entertaining cricketers in an age when cricket was beginning to capture the public imagination with huge crowds turning out for the big games in the big cities of England and Australia. Briggs toured Australia on six occasions when travelling Down Under meant an arduous sea voyage and, in all, took part in eleven Ashes series. To this day, he remains the only cricketer to take a hat-trick and score a century in cricket’s oldest and most combative series of matches. A true working-cla...
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