Lancashire County Cricket Club

Lancashire Cricket Club represents the historic county of Lancashire in English cricket. The club has held first-class status since it was founded in 1864. Lancashire's home is Old Trafford Cricket Ground, although the team also play matches at other grounds around the county. Lancashire was a founder member of the County Championship in 1890 and has won the competition nine times. Lancashire has won 26 major honours in its history. The club's limited overs team is called Lancashire Lightning.

Lancashire was widely recognised as the Champion County four times between 1879 and 1889. It won its first two County Championship titles in the 1897 and 1904 seasons. Between 1926 and 1934, it won the championship five times. Throughout most of the inter-war period, Lancashire and its neighbours Yorkshire had the best two teams in England and the Roses Matches between them were usually the highlight of the domestic season. In 1950, Lancashire shared the title with Surrey. The County Championship was restructured in 2000 with Lancashire in the first division. They won the 2011 County Championship, a gap of 77 years since the club's last outright title in 1934.

In 1895, Archie MacLaren scored 424 in an innings for Lancashire, which remains the highest score by an Englishman in first-class cricket. 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. England batsman Cyril Washbrook became Lancashire's first professional captain in 1954.

The Lancashire side of the late 1960s and early 1970s, captained by Jack Bond and featuring 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. They won the Twenty20 Cup for the first time in 2015.

Cricket may not have reached Lancashire until the 18th century. As advised by the Association of Cricket Statisticians (ACS), the earliest known reference to the sport being played in the county has been found in the Manchester Journal dated Saturday, 1 September 1781. It concerned an eleven-a-side match played the previous Monday, 27 August, at Brinnington Moor between a team of printers and one representing the villages of Haughton and Bredbury, who were the winners. As Bredbury was then in Cheshire, the match is the earliest reference for that county too.

In 1816, the Manchester Cricket Club was founded and soon became the main north country rivals of Nottingham Cricket Club and Sheffield Cricket Club. On 23–25 July 1849, the Sheffield and Manchester clubs played each other at Hyde Park in Sheffield but the fixture was styled Yorkshire v Lancashire. It was the first match to involve a team using Lancashire as its name and is sometimes reckoned to have been the first Roses Match. Yorkshire won by five wickets. Teams called Yorkshire, though based on the Sheffield club, had been active since 1833. The Roses Match is one of cricket's oldest and most famous rivalries. In 1857, the Manchester club moved to Old Trafford, which has been the home of Lancashire cricket ever since.

On 12 January 1864, Manchester Cricket Club organised a meeting at the Queen's Hotel in Manchester for the purpose of forming a club to represent the county. Thirteen local clubs were represented: Broughton, Longsight, Manchester and Western from the Manchester area; Huyton, Liverpool and Northern from Merseyside; Accrington, Ashton, Blackburn, Oldham, Whalley and Wigan from other towns. Lancashire County Cricket Club was founded with the object of, it was said, "spreading a thorough knowledge and appreciation of the game throughout Lancashire". It was intended to stage home matches alternately at Old Trafford, Aigburth, Preston, Blackburn and at "other places to help introduce good cricket throughout the county".

The new county club played its first-ever official game at Warrington against Birkenhead Park on Wednesday, 15 June 1864 but that was not a first-class match. The first inter-county match, which was first-class, was played in 1865 at Old Trafford against Middlesex; Lancashire won the match by 62 runs, although Middlesex's V. E. Walker took all ten wickets in Lancashire's second innings.