Playfair Cricket Annual
Playfair Cricket Annual is a compact annual about cricket that is published in the United Kingdom each April, just before the English cricket season is due to begin. It has been published every year since 1948. Its main purposes are to review the previous English season and to provide detailed career records and potted biographies of current players. It is produced in a "pocket-sized" format, being approximately 5×4 in (i.e., about 13×10 cm), so that it is a convenient size for carrying to cricket matches. The front cover of each edition has featured a photograph of a prominent current cricketer. There is a popular myth that this "honour" has a "hex" or "curse" associated with it, as the player featured then invariably has a poor season.
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".