List of Derbyshire County Cricket Club grounds

Interior view of the County Ground in Derby with a large number of people in the stands
The County Ground in Derby was first used in 1871 and has staged the vast majority of Derbyshire's games.

Derbyshire County Cricket Club is one of the 18 member clubs of the English County Championship, representing the historic county of Derbyshire. The club was established on 4 November 1870 and has competed in first-class cricket since 1871, List A cricket since 1963 and Twenty20 cricket since 2003.[1][2][3][A] Unlike most professional sports, in which a team usually has a single fixed home ground, county cricket clubs have traditionally used different grounds in various towns and cities within the county for home matches, although the use of minor "out grounds" has diminished since the 1980s.[4][5] The Derbyshire team have played first class, List A, or Twenty20 home matches at twenty-five different grounds. This includes grounds in Burton upon Trent, Knypersley, Leek, Cheadle and Checkley, all of which are not actually located in Derbyshire, but in the adjoining county of Staffordshire.[6][7]

The county's debut home game in first-class cricket was played at the County Ground in Derby against Lancashire.[8] The venue has also been known as the Racecourse Ground, as it had previously been used for horse racing,[9] and also served as the original home ground of Derby County Football Club, which was formed as an offshoot of the cricket club in 1884.[10] The County Ground has remained the cricket club's primary ground, hosting the majority of home matches, and also played host to the club's first home fixture in Twenty20 cricket against Nottinghamshire in 2003.[3] Queen's Park in Chesterfield, however, staged the club's first home game in List A cricket against Essex in 1964.[1] Queen's Park was first used by the county in 1898 and has continued to be a regular venue for Derbyshire matches, staging over 400 first-class games.

Between the Second World War and 2019, the county only used four new venues for first-class matches. In the late 1940s Abbeydale Park in Dore, a suburb of Sheffield, hosted two matches. Dore had been part of Derbyshire until 1934 but due to boundary changes was actually in the county of Yorkshire by the time Derbyshire played there,[11] and the ground has subsequently hosted Yorkshire CCC home matches.[4] Derbyshire played two first-class matches at the Bass Worthington Ground in Burton upon Trent in the 1970s and one at the Town Ground in Heanor in 1987. Several other grounds have been used for matches in the shorter forms of cricket since the 1980s, including Highfield in Leek. In 2020, a number of designated home games[12] were played at the opponents' grounds during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, as the County Ground was being used as an ECB biosecure training camp for the touring Pakistan team.[13]

  1. ^ a b "List A Matches played by Derbyshire". CricketArchive. Archived from the original on 27 June 2015. Retrieved 14 June 2015.
  2. ^ Marshall, Ian (2015). Playfair Cricket Annual 2015. Hachette UK. p. 1871. ISBN 978-1472212184.
  3. ^ a b "Twenty20 Matches played by Derbyshire". CricketArchive. Archived from the original on 27 June 2015. Retrieved 14 June 2015.
  4. ^ a b Glover, Andrew (10 April 2013). "Remembering Yorkshire County Cricket Club's out grounds". BBC News. Archived from the original on 25 September 2015. Retrieved 24 May 2015.
  5. ^ Stockton, Edward (13 June 2006). "Out of town but not out of favour". ESPNcricinfo. Archived from the original on 27 June 2015. Retrieved 26 June 2015.
  6. ^ "Staffordshire Moorlands". Ordnance Survey. Archived from the original on 15 April 2015. Retrieved 8 July 2015.
  7. ^ "Steven Gerrard: St George's Park is 'boring' and needs a golf course". BBC Sport. 24 June 2015. Archived from the original on 9 July 2015. Retrieved 8 July 2015.
  8. ^ "First-Class Matches played by Derbyshire". CricketArchive. Archived from the original on 6 July 2015. Retrieved 14 June 2015.
  9. ^ Cite error: The named reference county was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  10. ^ Mortimer, Gerald (2006). Derby County: The Complete Record. Breedon Books. p. 8. ISBN 1859835171.
  11. ^ "Sources for the History of Dore" (PDF). Sheffield City Council. Archived from the original (PDF) on 3 March 2016. Retrieved 3 June 2015.
  12. ^ Griffin, David (25 July 2020). "Bob Willis Trophy Preview". Derbyshire County Cricket Club. Retrieved 17 August 2020.
  13. ^ "Derby selected as bio-secure venue for England Women". ESPN. 21 July 2020. Retrieved 17 August 2020.