Cricket
Events
- 14 January — formation of Essex CCC at a meeting in the Shire Hall, Chelmsford. There have been previous county organisations in Essex going back to the 18th century, focused mainly on the famous Hornchurch Cricket Club.
- W G Grace becomes the first player to score 2000 runs and take 100 wickets in a season: 2622 runs and 130 wickets in 26 matches.
- Grace makes his highest first-class score of 344, for MCC v Kent at Canterbury in August. Two days later he makes 177 for Gloucestershire v Notts, and two days after that 318 not out for Gloucestershire v Yorkshire, the latter two innings against counties with exceptionally strong bowling attacks. Thus, in three consecutive innings, Grace scores 839 runs, and is only out twice. His 344 is the first triple century scored in first class cricket. William Ward's 278 scored in 1820 has stood as a record for 56 years; within a week Grace has bettered it twice.
England
- Champion County – Gloucestershire
- Most runs – W G Grace 2622 @ 62.42 (HS 344)
- Most wickets – Alfred Shaw 191 @ 13.61 (BB 8–37)
Read more about this topic: 1876 In Sports
Famous quotes containing the word cricket:
“All cries are thin and terse;
The field has droned the summer’s final mass;
A cricket like a dwindled hearse
Crawls from the dry grass.”
—Richard Wilbur (b. 1921)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)