Golden Age of cricket

The Golden Age of Cricket is a term that has often been applied in cricket literature to the period in English, Australian, and American cricket from the formation of the official County Championship in the 1890 season to the outbreak of World War I, which occurred just before the scheduled end of the 1914 season.

The period became infused with a nostalgic yearning, ostensibly because the teams played cricket according to "the spirit of the game". More poignantly, the nostalgia was due to loss of life in the Great War and a hankering for those happier times before the war's outbreak. A number of first-class cricketers were killed or wounded during the war, the deaths including eight Test players: Colin Blythe, Major Booth and Kenneth Hutchings of England, Tibby Cotter of Australia, and the four South Africans Reginald Hands, Bill Lundie, Reggie Schwarz and Gordon White. The war years also saw the deaths of W G Grace and Victor Trumper, who both succumbed to illness in 1915.

Cricket of the period did feature numerous great names such as Grace, Trumper, Blythe, Wilfred Rhodes, Jack Hobbs, C B Fry, K S Ranjitsinhji, and Frank Woolley, but that in itself is not unique, as any period in cricket history can boast its great players. As David Frith pointed out, the nostalgia "needed someone to put a perspective on it". In his 1939 autobiography, Fry wrote: "I have a notion that the cricket of the nineties and early nineteen hundreds was more amusing to watch, but I am not at all sure that the game of today is not more difficult to play."

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