About Lancashire Lightning

Lancashire County Cricket Club, one of eighteen first-class county clubs in the domestic cricket structure of England and Wales, represents the historic county of Lancashire. The club's limited overs team is called Lancashire Lightning.

Founded in 1864 as a successor to Manchester Cricket Club, Lancashire have played at Old Trafford since then and has had senior status from inception: i.e., classified by substantial sources as holding important match status from 1865 (first match) to 1894; classified as an official first-class team from 1895 by Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) and the County Championship clubs; classified as a List A team since the beginning of limited overs cricket in 1963; and classified as a senior Twenty20 team since 2003.

Lancashire was widely recognised as the unofficial Champion County four times between 1879 and 1889. When the County Championship was officially founded in December 1889, Lancashire was one of eight clubs to feature in the competition’s first season in 1890. In 1895, Archie MacLaren scored 424 in an innings for Lancashire, which remains the highest score by an Englishman in first-class cricket. Lancashire won their first two County Championship titles in 1897 and 1904. Between 1926 and 1934, Lancashire won the County Championship five times. In 1950, they shared the title with Surrey. Cyril Washbrook became Lancashire’s first professional captain in 1954. Lancashire next won the County Championship in 2011, after a gap of 77 years.

Johnny Briggs, whose career lasted from 1879 to 1900, was the first player to score 10,000 runs and take 1,000 wickets for Lancashire. Ernest Tyldesley, younger brother of Johnny Tyldesley, is the club’s leading run-scorer with 34,222 runs in 573 matches for Lancashire between 1909 and 1936. Fast bowler Brian Statham took a club record 1,816 wickets in 430 first-class matches between 1950 and 1968.

The Lancashire side of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which was captained by Jack Bond and featured the West Indian batsman Clive Lloyd, was successful in limited overs cricket, winning the Sunday League in 1969 and 1970 and the Gillette Cup four times between 1970 and 1975. Lancashire won the Benson and Hedges Cup in 1984, three times between 1990 and 1996, and the Sunday League in 1989, 1998 and 1999. The County Championship was restructured in 2000 with Lancashire in the first division. Since then they have been relegated three times, and each time were promoted the following season.