Kent, which had a celebrated team at the time, has long been acknowledged as a champion county in most seasons of the 1840s but in other years there is no clear-cut contender.For the Champion County match traditionally played by the winners of the Championship, see Champion County match.
Number of teams 18 Current champion Essex Most successful Yorkshire (32 titles 1 shared) Most runs Phil Mead (46,268) 1 Most wickets Tich Freeman (3,151) 2 Bob Willis Trophy. The competition consists of eighteen clubs named after, and originally representing, historic counties, seventeen from England and one from Wales. From 2016, the Championship has been sponsored by Specsavers, who replaced Liverpool Victoria after 14 years. Until 1889, the concept of an unofficial county championship existed whereby various claims would be made by or on behalf of a particular club as the Champion County, an archaic term which now has the specific meaning of a claimant for the unofficial title prior to 1890. In contrast, the term County Champions applies in common parlance to a team that has won the official title. In the majority of cases, the claim or proclamation was retrospective, often by cricket writers using reverse analysis via a study of known results. The unofficial title was not proclaimed in every season up to 1889 because in many cases there were not enough matches or there was simply no clear candidate. Having already been badly hit by the Seven Years War, county cricket ceased altogether during the Napoleonic Wars and there was a period from 1797 to 1824 during which no inter-county matches took place. The concept of the unofficial title has been utilised ad hoc and relied on sufficient interest being shown. While this was going on, representatives of the eight leading county clubs held a private meeting to discuss the method by which the county championship should in future be decided. The new competition began in the 1890 season and at first involved just the eight leading clubs: Gloucestershire, Kent, Lancashire, Middlesex, Nottinghamshire, Surrey, Sussex and Yorkshire. Subsequently, the championship has been expanded to 18 clubs by the additions at various times of Derbyshire, Durham, Essex, Glamorgan, Hampshire, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Somerset, Warwickshire and Worcestershire. While early matches were often between teams named after counties, they were not the club teams the usage would imply today. Rowland Bowen states in his history that the earliest usage of the term County Championship occurred in 1837 re a match between Kent and Nottingham Cricket Club which for the purposes of that match was called Nottingham shire. That may be so re the actual terminology but closer examination of the sources does indicate a much earlier expression of the idea. The first time a source refers to the superiority of one county is in respect of a match between Edwin Stead s XI from Kent and Sir William Gage s XI from Sussex at Penshurst Park in August 1728. Steads side won by an unknown margin and the source states that this was the third time this summer that the Kent men have been too expert for those of Sussex. The following year, Gages team turned the scales and defeated Steads side, prompting a source to remark that (the scale of victory) for some years past has been generally on the Kentish side. In 1730, a newspaper referred to the Kentish champions. There were a number of contemporary allusions to the best county including some in verse, such as one by a Kent supporter celebrating a victory over Hampshire in terms of (we shall) bring down the pride of the Hambledon Club. The most successful county teams were Hampshire, Kent, Middlesex, Surrey and Sussex. But there was often a crossover between town and county with some strong local clubs tending at times to represent a whole county. Examples are London, which often played against county teams and was in some respects almost a county club in itself; Slindon, which was for a few years in the 1740s effectively representative of Sussex as a county; Dartford, often representative of Kent; and the Hambledon Club, certainly representative of Hampshire and also perhaps of Sussex. Other good county teams in the 18th century were Berkshire, Essex and Middlesex. Rowland Bowen published his ideas about this in the 1960s when he was the editor of the Cricket Quarterly periodical. He began by stating that Sussex was publicly acknowledged as the best county in the 1827 season when they played against All England in the roundarm trial matches, although the teams involvement in these matches had more to do with the fact that Sussex was the prime mover in the roundarm revolution.
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