Premier League Cricket - Where it all Started

Eighty years ago, almost to the day, two of the world’s top cricketers faced each other across the traditional 22 yards of turf that make up a cricket pitch. That was all that was traditional about the encounter.

Like the stars of the IPL today, these giants of the sport were not playing for their respective countries, England and the West Indies. Nor were they playing for a first class county or Island team.

The first of the two was Sydney Barnes, who even at 58 years of age might still have been considered the world’s greatest bowler. Thirty years before, Barnes had been a mystery pick for England’s 1902 tour of Australia. There he had shocked the cricketing world in exactly the same way that Shane Warne was to do more recently when his ‘ball of the century’ exploded on poor Mike Gatting.

If you can imagine the mystery of a Muttiah Muralitharan twinned with the bounce of a McGrath in a single bowler, you may be somewhere close to picturing the guile and devastating penetration of Sydney Barnes.

The second great player, with his pads on and ready to face Barnes, was Learie Constantine, then, the world’s fastest bowler and, as a hard hitting and attacking batsman, the top all-rounder of his age.

Learie’s speed and hostility terrified batsmen and his belligerent hitting thrilled everyone who ever saw him. Imagine Chris Gayle and Wes Hall in one player. That was Constantine, pace and power, pleasure and extravagance.

The arena for this encounter was a match between Nelson and Rawtenstall two small towns that played in the Lancashire League.

Constantine was Nelson’s ‘paid man’, the one professional permitted in the side by the League’s special rules. All other players had to live or have been born within eight miles of the Club’s ground.

Every match was therefore a local derby played out between two adjacent communities in an area smaller than a modern city.

The Lancashire League was, and still is, made up of 14 sides representing the towns and urban villages in a confined area of East Lancashire, perhaps ten miles square, where fast rivers cut steep sided valleys into the Pennine Hills and where the only flat piece of ground was bagged for cricket.

In their heyday, these were boom towns where unimaginable wealth was being created in the factories or mills of the first industrial revolution. Fast flowing rivers produced the energy that drove the looms and provided the water that set the dyes in the birthplace of mass produced textiles.

In a story now familiar across the globe, workers poured in from the countryside and lived in hastily built homes side by side with the mills in which they worked long hours.

For a brief period on a Sunday afternoon these workers could escape into a world of cricketing mania, united by rivalries, entertained by their champions and mocking their opponents in grounds built in the shadows of the mills that echoed to the taunts, heckles, applause and cheering of raucous supporters. They went to the cricket in their thousands.

Attendances easily outnumbered those of the first class cricket of the time. Their gate money allowed the clubs to employ good cricketers as professionals who looked after the grounds, coached the amateurs and led the batting and bowling attacks.

These “pro’s” as they were called were paid well, 30 shillings a week in the 1880s. But they were expected to earn their pay with bat and ball. The cricket committees who employed them and the huge crowds who paid good money to watch them demanded fifties and seven-fers … every Sunday.

In the 1920s Nelson had innovated. They daringly hired the Australian ‘express’ bowler Ted MacDonald who had humbled many an international batsman. Where they led others followed and within a few seasons the Lancashire League provided a unique place to see the world’s best going head to head, side by side with local amateur players.

Towards the end of the decade Nelson’s cash tempted Constantine to leave his warm Island home and spend the English summer playing in the Lancashire League.

Not to be outdone, nearby Rawtenstall hired Syd Barnes, a man with a staggering total of 3,373 wickets including 189 test match victims to his name.

It set up one of the great confrontations in cricket which, in many ways, has only been matched in recent times and in India by the extraordinary encounters made possible by the Indian Premier League.

(to be continued)