Cricket in England
Cricket in England is one of the most popular sports in the country and is known to have been played in England since the 16th century. The Marylebone Cricket Club, based at Lords, developed the modern rules of play and conduct.There are eighteen professional county clubs, seventeen of them in England and one in Wales. All eighteen counties are named after, and were originally representative of, historic counties. These clubs are heavily dependent on subsidies from the England and Wales Cricket Board, which makes its money from television and endorsement contracts and attendances at international matches. The English cricket season traditionally starts at the beginning of April and runs though to the second half of September although in recent years counties have played pre season friendly matches at the very end of March.
1752 English cricket season
It was a very important year in dating terms. The Gregorian calendar, first devised in 1582, was finally adopted in Great Britain. An 11-day discrepancy between the Julian and Gregorian versions was corrected by having Wednesday, 2 September 1752 followed by Thursday, 14 September 1752. There was civil unrest among the population due to a widespread belief that people’s lives were literally being shortened by 11 days. For the purposes of cricket history, the calendar change has minimal impact because the cricket season never began before 25 March and so the year is always the same whether a Julian or Gregorian date is used, apart from a few "out of season" references that need to be noted accordingly. The only problem is that care has to be taken re any original sources that insisted on using the Julian date after the Gregorian Calendar was introduced. Indeed, there is an example of this below in the case of the "Sussex Weekly Advertiser".