Kent County Cricket Club in 1906
After dominating county cricket in the early years of Queen Victoria's reign, the players who made up Kent's great side of the 1840s had retired and by the 1850s the county had been reduced to often having to amalgamate with other sides to produce a challenging team. The formation of a County Club in Maidstone in 1859 and the amalgamation of this with the original Kent Cricket Club in 1870 to create the modern Kent County Cricket Club, provided the basis for re-emergence, although the club suffered from financial instability and Lord Harris's view was that Kent could not hope to compete at the level it once had throughout the 1870s and 1880s. When the County Championship was formerly established in 1890 Kent were initially able to finish only in mid table.
Kent county cricket teams
The Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians (ACS) considers Kent to be one of cricket's "major counties" throughout its entire history and rates all Kent county matches in the 18th and 19th centuries, as well as many played by teams called East Kent or West Kent, as first-class. The ACS have explained that any match between a strong Kent eleven and another top-class team justifies the classification but caution is needed with nomenclature because of the different committees and sponsors who organised the games and would sometimes use team names other than "Kent".