A Test and County Cricket Board Under-25s XI was a cricket team formed by the Test and County Cricket Board which was made up of players under 25 years of age. [n 1] The players were considered to be on the fringes of selection for the England cricket team. The team played one match which was rated as first-class against the touring Indians in August 1990. [1] Of the eleven that started the match, only John Stephenson and Nasser Hussain had played Test cricket prior to this match. The team included future Test cricketers Martin Bicknell, Richard Blakey, Richard Illingworth, Tim Munton, and Graham Thorpe. [2] The remainder of the team consisting of Paul Johnson, Stuart Lampitt, Keith Medlycott and Nadeem Shahid would never play at international level. [2] Of the Test cricketers, Hussain would be the most successful, making 96 Test appearances and captaining England in 45 Tests. [3] The teams only first-class match against the Indians ended in a draw, with Indian batsman Sanjay Manjrekar and Navjot Sidhu both scoring centuries, a feat also achieved by the Under-25s XI captain John Stephenson. [2]
John Augustine Snow is a retired English international cricketer who played for Sussex from 1961 to 1977 and represented England in 49 Test matches. He was born in Peopleton, Worcestershire.
Anil Kumble is a former Indian cricket captain, coach and commentator who played Test and One Day International cricket for his national team over an international career of 18 years. Widely regarded as one of the best leg spin bowlers in Test Cricket History, he took 619 wickets in Test cricket and is the fourth highest wicket taker of all time as of 2022. In 1999 while playing against Pakistan, Kumble dismissed all ten batsmen in a Test match innings, joining England's Jim Laker as the second player to achieve the feat. Unlike his contemporaries, Kumble was not a big turner of the ball, but relied primarily on pace, bounce, and accuracy. He was nicknamed "Apple" and "Jumbo". Kumble was selected as the Cricketer of the Year in 1993 Indian Cricket, and one of the Wisden Cricketers of the Year three years later. Kumble was a member of the Indian team that was one of the joint-winners of the 2002 ICC Champions Trophy, which the title was also shared with Sri Lanka.
Graeme Ashley Hick is a Zimbabwean-born former England cricketer who played 65 Test matches and 120 One Day Internationals for England. He was born in Rhodesia, and as a young man played international cricket for Zimbabwe. He played English county cricket for Worcestershire for his entire English domestic career, a period of well over twenty years, and in 2008 surpassed Graham Gooch's record for the most matches in all forms of the game combined.
Nasser Hussain is a British cricket commentator and former cricketer who captained the England cricket team between 1999 and 2003, with his overall international career extending from 1990 to 2004. A pugnacious right-handed batsman, Hussain scored over 30,000 runs from more than 650 matches across all first-class and List-A cricket, including 62 centuries. His highest Test score of 207, scored in the first Test of the 1997 Ashes at Edgbaston, was described by Wisden as "touched by genius". He played 96 Test matches and 88 One Day International games in total. In Tests he scored 5,764 runs, and he took 67 catches, fielding predominantly in the second slip and gully.
Michael Paul Vaughan is an English cricket commentator and former cricketer who played all forms of the game. He served as England captain for the test team from 2003 to 2008, the one-day international team from 2003 to 2007, and was the first Twenty20 England captain from 2005 to 2007. He represented Yorkshire in the domestic arena.
The England cricket team represents England and Wales in international cricket. Since 1997, it has been governed by the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB), having been previously governed by Marylebone Cricket Club since 1903. England, as a founding nation, is a Full Member of the International Cricket Council (ICC) with Test, One Day International (ODI) and Twenty20 International (T20I) status. Until the 1990s, Scottish and Irish players also played for England as those countries were not yet ICC members in their own right.
Graeme Craig Smith is a South African cricket commentator and former cricketer who played for South Africa in all formats. In 2003, he was appointed captain of the national team, taking over from Shaun Pollock. He held the position of test captain until his retirement in 2014. At 22, he was appointed as South Africa's youngest ever captain. He was the most capped captain ever when he played his 102nd test against England. He is considered as one of the greatest ever test captains of all-time having led South Africa to a record 54 test victories and under his captaincy South Africa was often highlighted as the best travelling team in the world.
Yorkshire County Cricket Club is one of eighteen first-class county clubs within the domestic cricket structure of England and Wales. It represents the historic county of Yorkshire. Yorkshire's first team is the most successful in English cricketing history with 33 County Championship titles, including one shared. The team's most recent Championship title was in 2015. The club's limited overs team is called the Yorkshire Vikings and their kit colours are Cambridge blue, Oxford blue, and yellow.
Kumara Chokshananda Sangakkara is a Sri Lankan cricket commentator, coach, former professional cricketer, businessman, and the former president of the MCC. He is also an ICC Hall of Fame inductee.
Andrew Richard Caddick is a former cricketer who played for England as a fast bowler in Tests and ODIs. At 6 ft 5in, Caddick was a successful bowler for England for a decade, taking 13 five-wicket hauls in Test matches. He spent his entire English domestic first-class cricket career at Somerset County Cricket Club, and then played one Minor Counties match for Wiltshire in 2009.
Raymond Illingworth CBE was an English cricketer, cricket commentator and administrator. As of 2015, he was one of only nine players to have taken 2,000 wickets and made 20,000 runs in first-class cricket. He played for Yorkshire, Leicestershire (1969–1978) and England (1958–1973) and was a Wisden Cricketer of the Year in 1960.
Essex County Cricket Club is one of eighteen first-class county clubs within the domestic cricket structure of England and Wales. It represents the historic county of Essex. Founded in 1876, the club had minor county status until 1894 when it was promoted to first-class status pending its entry into the County Championship in 1895, since then the team has played in every top-level domestic cricket competition in England. Essex currently play all their home games at the County Cricket Ground, Chelmsford. The club has formerly used other venues throughout the county including Lower Castle Park in Colchester, Valentines Park in Ilford, Leyton Cricket Ground, the Gidea Park Sports Ground in Romford, and Garon Park and Southchurch Park, both in Southend. Its limited overs team is called the Essex Eagles.
Richard Keith Illingworth is an English former cricketer, who is currently an umpire. The bulk of his domestic cricketing career occurred with Worcestershire, although he had a spell with Derbyshire, and overseas with Natal. He played in nine Tests and twenty five ODIs for England, including participating in the 1992 and 1996 Cricket World Cups. Several websites, mistakenly, report that he is Ray Illingworth's son but the two are not related.
Trevor Edward Bailey was an England Test cricketer, cricket writer and broadcaster.
In the 1970 English cricket season, a scheduled South African tour was cancelled for political reasons. As this meant there would be no international cricket in England that season, a Rest of the World team was assembled to play a series of five-day matches against England. At the time, they were played as Test matches, but that status was later revoked by the International Cricket Conference (ICC) and they are now termed unofficial Tests, though still officially first-class matches.
The South African rebel tours were a series of seven cricket tours staged between 1982 and 1990. They were known as the rebel tours because the international cricketing bodies banned South Africa from competitive international cricket throughout this period because of apartheid. As such the tours were organised and conducted in spite of the express disapproval of national cricket boards and governments, the International Cricket Conference and international organisations such as the United Nations. The tours were the subject of enormous contemporaneous controversy and remain a sensitive topic throughout the cricket-playing world.
The British Universities cricket team was a cricket team whose players were drawn from university students studying in Great Britain. The team played under the title of Combined Universities until 1995. The team played List A cricket from 1975 to 1998 and first-class cricket from 1993 to 2006.
Richard Allan Kettleborough is an English international cricket umpire, and former first-class cricketer who appeared in 33 first-class matches for Yorkshire and Middlesex. He was a left-handed top order batsman and occasional right-arm medium pace bowler. He attended Worksop College and was a member of the college cricket XI for a number of years.