Derbyshire return to red ball cricket this week as they welcome Nottinghamshire to The 3aaa County Ground in the Specsavers County Championship, starting on Sunday 6 August at 11am.
Heritage Officer, David Griffin, looks at the statistical background to the game.
This will be the 200th scheduled first class game between these two sides, with only Leicestershire and Yorkshire having been Derbyshire’s opponents on more occasions.
Derbyshire has been the home side in 100 of the previous 199 clashes with 46 of the encounters taking place at Ilkeston, 36 at Derby, 14 at Chesterfield, three at Blackwell and once at Glossop.
Overall, Derbyshire has won 44 times, Nottinghamshire 65, with 90 drawn matches, and four abandoned without a ball being bowled since their first encounter at Nottingham in May 1875. The first game at home was later in the same season when Derby hosted the fixture.
Derbyshire’s highest innings score against Nottinghamshire is 572 – all out, at Derby in 2001, and for seven wickets declared at the same ground in 1991. During the 1991 fixture, Mohammad Azharuddin scored his 2,000th run of the season, a feat only ever achieved by three players for Derbyshire (Donald Carr and Peter Bowler are the others), while Kim Barnett scored 217, one of four double centuries for the club.
Derbyshire’s last victory at Derby came back in 1998 when the hosts triumphed in an exciting encounter in the opening game of the season.
Nottinghamshire were dismissed for 118 and when Derbyshire replied with 388, only one side looked likely to win. The visitors replied with 312 in their second innings and with time running out, Derbyshire scrambled to a six-wicket win, scoring 43-4 in just 5 overs with Phil DeFreitas smashing 32 from 19 balls.
The fixture in 2002 resulted in Nottinghamshire winning by just one wicket, deep into the final hour on the fourth day after a match of fluctuating fortunes. Derbyshire had a first innings lead of over 100 runs and set their opponents a challenging 323 to win on the final day. Despite the best efforts of captain Dominic Cork, who took his 50th first class wicket of the season in only his ninth game, the visitors’ last-wicket pair added 46 runs to seal a dramatic win.
The final day of the 1989 season brought about a similarly close win for Derbyshire. After Nottinghamshire had posted 330, Derbyshire replied with 293, largely due to a superb 156 by John Morris, before the visitors were skittled for 119 in their second innings as Holding, Warner, Base and Jean-Jacques tore through their batting to leave Derbyshire needing 160 to win. Peter Bowler made a fluent 58, but no other batsman could stay with him and when the ninth wicket fell, Derbyshire still needed 21 runs to win with Holding and Base at the crease.
As the September shadows lengthened, and Nottinghamshire’s bowlers strived to take the final wicket, Michael Holding, playing in his final first class match, struck the winning runs as Derbyshire secured a dramatic one wicket win. A small crowd, plus all the players and officials, gave Holding a well-deserved standing ovation as he left a cricket field for the final time as a player.
Numerous Derbyshire players have enjoyed some success in this fixture; John Morris scored a hundred before lunch in 1989, while two years later, Kim Barnett made 217, the only double hundred scored by a Derbyshire player against Nottinghamshire at Derby.
The last players to score a hundred in this fixture at Derby were Hasan Adnan (140) and Chris Bassano (123 not out) in the same game in 2004.
In that same fixture, Graeme Welch took 5-101 in the first innings, the last time a Derbyshire player took five wickets in an innings in this fixture at Derby, while the best innings analysis was recorded by the legendary William Mycroft who took 7-55 in 1875.
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