Somerset April 11th
Questions
1 Sussex started playing first-class cricket in 1815, Somerset started in 1882. What year did they first meet?
2 In what year did Sussex and Somerset first meet in a limited-overs match?
3 Who was the Somerset captain who spent formative years here in Sussex, who played Test cricket for two countries, rugby union for England, hockey for Somerset and football for the Sussex amateur team?
4 What was special about the Somerset cricketers Alfred Bowerman and Montague Toller?
5 In the Championship match at Taunton in August 1901, the Sussex captain, K.S.Ranjitsinhji, batted through the last day scoring 285* to save the match for the Sussex. What had he done the night before?
6 What was special about the first meeting (in May, 1919) between Sussex and Somerset after the Great War?
7 Who was the Somerset batter who played for the county for just three seasons, yet scored 6,975 runs at an average of 69.75?
8 What else was special about the Sussex total of 742 for five at Taunton in 2009?
9 What do the Sussex clubs Eastbourne and Horsham, and the Somerset club Bath have in common?
10 When did Somerset and Sussex last meet in the County Championship?
Answers
1 Their first meeting was on 21 and 22 July, 1892 at Taunton. (Somerset won on the second of the three days allocated. The return match here at Hove in September was almost completely washed out.)
2 In 1964 in the quarter final of the Gillette Cup at Taunton, then sixty-overs affairs. (Sussex won, scoring only 141 in 54.5 overs, but they bowled out Somerset for only 125 runs.)
3 Sammy Woods, who was Somerset captain from 1894 to 1906.
4 They played cricket for the team representing England in the 1900 Olympic Games in Paris. (They were members of the Devon and Somerset Wanderers side representing England which won in the only cricket match ever played in an Olympic Games.)
5 He had been fishing all night – apparently. (His 285 set a new Sussex record not beaten until his nephew’s 333 in 1930.)
6 The match was tied, with the last Sussex batter in effect ‘timed out’. (This was the famous Heygate incident. With the scores equal, the last Sussex batsman, Harold Heygate took more than two minutes to reach the wicket – he had not been expected to bat because he was suffering from rheumatism and came out wearing his ‘street clothes’. On an appeal from Len Braund, the Somerset Test player, umpire Alfred Street, a Test umpire himself, gave him ‘out’.)
7 Jimmy Cook, later a South African Test player, who was the leading Championship run-scorer in 1989, 1990 and 1991.
8 It included Murray Goodwin’s 344 not out, the highest individual score in first-class cricket for Sussex. (Not surprisingly, the match was drawn.)
9 They have all won the National Club Championship. (Eastbourne won it in 1997, Horsham in 2005 and Bath in 2021. The competition has been running since 1969.)
10 In September 2015, at Hove. (The match was a rain-curtailed draw.)