Nottingham Cricket Club

Several Nottingham Cricket Club matches have been recorded from 1771 to 1848 and its team generally held important match status in eleven-a-side matches, depending on the quality of their opponents. The earliest reference to cricket in the county of Nottinghamshire is a match between Nottingham and Sheffield Cricket Club at the Forest Racecourse, Nottingham in August 1771. In many sources, the Nottingham team is called the "Nottingham Old Club" or as the "town club" to distinguish it from Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club, which was founded in 1841. A team called Nottinghamshire had played since 1835 but is believed to have been organised by the town club and only using the county name in certain matches.

Nottingham's opponents in their important matches were most often Sheffield. They played several games against Leicestershire & Rutland a.k.a. Leicester. They had two matches against Cambridge Town Club, one against Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) and one against a combined Leicester/Sheffield team.

Nottinghamshire as a county team played its first inter-county match versus Sussex at Brown's Ground in Brighton on 27, 28 & 29 August 1835. All the previous matches had involved Nottingham as a town rather than Nottinghamshire as a county. Nottinghamshire has been recognised as an important/first-class county team from 1835. The club grew in strength during the first thirty years of the 19th century and, by the time the county club was founded in 1841, Nottinghamshire was one of the "great counties" in cricket. In either March or April 1841, the formal creation of Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club was enacted. The exact date has been lost. However, as noted above, an informal county club may have been active in 1835.

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