List of Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club grounds

Interior view of Trent Bridge cricket stadium during a night-time game
Trent Bridge hosted Nottinghamshire's debut home match in first-class cricket and remains the club's primary ground.

Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club is one of the 18 member clubs of the English County Championship, representing the historic county of Nottinghamshire,[1] and also competes in major competitions in other formats of the game. Although there are records of a team competing as Nottinghamshire at an earlier date,[2] the current club was established in 1841[3] and has competed in first-class cricket from 1841,[2] List A cricket from 1963 and Twenty20 cricket from 2003.[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 or close to the county for home matches, although the use of minor "out grounds" away from the club's main headquarters has diminished since the 1980s.[4][5] The Nottinghamshire team have played first class, List A, or Twenty20 matches at nine different grounds, although of these only one has hosted Twenty20 games.

The current Nottinghamshire club's debut home game in first-class cricket was played at Trent Bridge in Nottingham. The ground had been laid out in the 1830s by William Clarke, captain of the All-England Eleven, who was married to the landlady of the Trent Bridge Inn.[6] Trent Bridge also played host to the club's first home fixtures in the other formats of the game; in List A cricket in 1965 against Wiltshire; and in Twenty20 cricket against Lancashire in 2003. The ground has also been used for matches not including Nottinghamshire, including extensively by England.

Other than a single match played in Newark-on-Trent in 1856 and two games played in Welbeck Abbey between 1901 and 1904, Trent Bridge was the home venue for all the county's first-class matches until the 1920s. In 1921 Nottinghamshire began to play at the Town Ground in Worksop, which was used for a single first-class match in most seasons until 1998, and also hosted three List A games between 1970 and 1980. From 1999 until 2014, the only ground used by the club other than Trent Bridge was the Sports Ground in Cleethorpes, which is not actually in Nottinghamshire but in the adjoining county of Lincolnshire.[7] This ground hosted four first-class matches between 1980 and 1990, and five List A matches between 1983 and 2004. In 2015, Nottinghamshire played two List A matches at the John Fretwell Sporting Complex in Warsop, the first time they had played at a ground in their home county other than Trent Bridge for 17 years. The ground has continued to be used, and in 2019 hosted a first-class match for the first time.[8]

  1. ^ Armitage, Jill (2015). Nottingham: A History. Amberley Publishing Limited. p. 142. ISBN 978-1-4456-3519-4.
  2. ^ a b "First-class matches played by Nottinghamshire". CricketArchive. Archived from the original on 16 September 2015. Retrieved 12 August 2015.
  3. ^ Marshall, Ian (2015). Playfair Cricket Annual 2015. Hachette UK. p. 2014. ISBN 978-1-4722-1218-4.
  4. ^ 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. ^ Wynne-Thomas, Peter. "A Brief History of Trent Bridge". ESPNcricinfo. Archived from the original on 24 September 2015. Retrieved 12 August 2015.
  7. ^ "Tourist Information Centre". North East Lincolnshire Council. Archived from the original on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 10 January 2016.
  8. ^ "First-Class Matches played on The John Fretwell Sporting Complex, Nettleworth (0)". CricketArchive. Archived from the original on 29 March 2019. Retrieved 29 March 2019.