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 Club in 2016
Kent played 16 County Championship matches in 2016, playing once at home and once away against each of the other eight counties in Division Two. Six home matches were played at the St Lawrence Ground in Canterbury, with one match at both the Nevill Ground in Tunbridge Wells and the County Cricket Ground, Beckenham. The county won five games, drew eight and lost only twice in the Championship, finishing second to Essex County Cricket Club. In previous years a second-place finish would have led to promotion to Division One of the Championship, but 2016 saw a rebalancing of the number of teams in each division and, as a result, only one team was promoted.