Warwickshire County Cricket Club is one of the 18 member clubs of the English County Championship, representing the historic county of Warwickshire. The club was established on 8 April 1882 and has played first-class cricket since 1894, [1] List A cricket since 1963, [2] and Twenty20 cricket since 2003. [3] [A] Unlike most professional sports, in which a team usually has a single fixed home ground, county cricket clubs have traditionally used different grounds in various towns and cities within the county for home matches, although the use of minor "out grounds" has diminished since the 1980s. [4] [5] Warwickshire have played first class, List A, or Twenty20 matches at eleven different grounds. Six of these grounds are or were located in the cities of Birmingham and Coventry, which no longer lie within the county of Warwickshire due to changes in the county boundaries in England in 1974. [6]
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The county's debut home match in first-class cricket was played at Edgbaston Cricket Ground in Birmingham against Kent in 1894. [7] At this time the ground stood on land owned by the Gough-Calthorpe family, who had developed the manor of Edgbaston into an exclusive Birmingham suburb during the 19th century, and believed that a cricket ground would enhance the image of the district. Warwickshire had previously considered locating their headquarters in Rugby or Leamington Spa, but secretary William Ansell considered Birmingham more suitable due to its large population and railway connections. [8] Edgbaston has remained the club's primary ground, hosting the majority of the club's matches, and also played host to the club's first home fixtures in the other formats of the game; in List A cricket in 1964 against Hampshire; and in Twenty20 cricket against Glamorgan in 2003. Since 1902 the ground has also hosted matches played by the England cricket team. [7]
Warwickshire played all their matches at Edgbaston until 1903, when they played at the Bulls Head Ground in Coventry, which was used once a year until 1919, other than during the First World War. Over 70 years later, the club returned to the ground for three matches in the early 1990s. [9] Prior to the First World War the club also played first-class matches at Arlington Avenue in Leamington Spa and Weddington Road in Nuneaton. In the interwar years, the county began to play matches at The Butts Ground and Morris Motors Ground in Coventry, the Griff and Coton Ground in Nuneaton and the Mitchells and Butlers' Ground in Birmingham. Of these grounds, only the latter two continued to be used after the Second World War. In 1946 the county began to use the Courtaulds Ground in Coventry and continued to play there until the 1980s.
The only ground other than Edgbaston used by Warwickshire for first-class cricket in the 21st century is Swans Nest Lane in Stratford-upon-Avon. Having only previously played a single match there in 1951, Warwickshire returned to the ground to play one first-class match in each of 2004 and 2005 as well as a single List A match in the latter year. Additionally, the county played a Twenty20 match at Rugby School in 2013 and planned to make this an annual occurrence, although the match scheduled for 2014 was abandoned without any play taking place due to bad weather. [10] The team did, however, play one List A match at the school in 2015, and have scheduled three matches at the school in the 2024 One-Day Cup. [11] Some of the grounds formerly used by the county still play host to matches at lower levels of the sport, such as those in Leamington Spa and Stratford-upon-Avon, which are used regularly by club teams playing in the Birmingham and District Premier League. Others, however, are disused, such as the Courtaulds Ground in Coventry, which in 2011 was reported to be overgrown and derelict, with only one wall of the pavilion still standing. [12]
