An English cricket

Cricket

Cricket is a bat-and-ball game played between two teams of 11 players on an oval-shaped field, at the centre of which is a rectangular 22-yard long pitch. One team bats, trying to score as many runs as possible while the other team bowls and fields, trying to dismiss the batsmen and thus limit the...

 team led by Lord Hawke toured Ceylon and India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

 in the winter of 1892-93.

The team played four first-class

First-class cricket

First-class cricket is a class of cricket that consists of matches of three or more days' scheduled duration, that are between two sides of eleven players and are officially adjudged first-class by virtue of the standard of the competing teams...

 matches, all of them in India, including the first match ever to involve an All-India XI. This was the second visit by an English team to India and the third to Ceylon.

The team left Tilbury

Tilbury

Tilbury is a town in the borough of Thurrock, Essex, England. As a settlement it is of relatively recent existence, although it has important historical connections, being the location of a 16th century fort and an ancient cross-river ferry...

 on 14 October 1892 and the tour ended in the first week of March 1893. In all, they played 23 matches of which 15 were won, 2 lost and 6 drawn. Three of the matches were in Ceylon. The team was made up of fourteen amateurs and included six past and future Test cricket

Test cricket

Test cricket is the longest form of the sport of cricket. Test matches are played between national representative teams with "Test status", as determined by the International Cricket Council , with four innings played between two teams of 11 players over a period of up to a maximum five days...

ers.

Lord Hawke fell ill early on the tour (as in 1889-90) and missed matches in Ceylon.

The team

Hawke, Vernon and Gibson were also part of the 1889-90 team. Jackson and Hill were at Cambridge and Jackson had just been appointed as the captain of the Cambridge cricket team

Cambridge University Cricket Club

Cambridge University Cricket Club is a first-class cricket team. It now plays all but one of its first-class cricket matches as part of the Cambridge University Centre of Cricketing Excellence , which includes Anglia Ruskin University...

.

External sources

• CricketArchive tour itinerary

Further reading

• Rowland Bowen
  Rowland Bowen
  Major Rowland Francis Bowen was a cricket researcher, historian and writer....
  
  , Cricket: A History of its Growth and Development, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1970
• Vasant Raiji
  Vasant Raiji
  Vasant Naisadrai Raiji, , is a former cricketer and cricket historian.Raiji opened the batting for Bombay and Baroda in Ranji Trophy, and was a reserve of the Hindu team in the 1941 Bombay Pentangular. At the end of his playing career, he turned to writing and is the author of several works on...
  
  , India's Hambledon Men, Tyeby Press, 1986
• Mihir Bose
  Mihir Bose
  Mihir Bose also referred to as Spermy ,is a British Indian sportswriter and journalist, who was the BBC's sports editor until 4 August 2009.-Early life:...
  
  , A History of Indian Cricket, Andre-Deutsch, 1990
• Ramachandra Guha
  Ramachandra Guha
  Ramachandra Guha is an Indian writer whose research interests have included environmental, social, political and cricket history. He is also a columnist for the newspapers The Telegraph , and The Hindustan Times.-Early life and education:Born in Dehra Dun, Uttarakhand, India in 1958, Guha studied...
  
  , A Corner of a Foreign Field - An Indian History of a British Sport, Picador, 2001

See also

• GF Vernon's XI cricket team in Ceylon and India in 1889-90