Welsh cricket team
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Wales | |
Flag of Wales | |
ICC membership granted | n/a |
ICC member status | Non member in own right, part of England |
ICC development region | n/a |
Captain | n/a |
World Cricket League division | n/a |
European Cricket Championship division | n/a |
First recorded match | 21 July 1923 v Scotland at Perth, Scotland |
ICC Trophy | |
Appearances | 1 (First in 1979) |
Best result | First round, 1979 |
First class cricket | |
First class matches played | 16 |
First class wins/losses | 5/5 |
As of 11 September 2006 |
The Welsh cricket team has appeared on a number of occasions. Generally however, Welsh players are represented in international play by England. From 1923 to 1930 Wales played 16 first-class matches, and had some success against touring teams, drawing with the New Zealanders in 1927 and beating the West Indians a year later, as well as losing by only ten runs to the South Africans in 1929. Sydney Barnes, by this time well into his fifties, took 49 first-class wickets for Wales, including 7-51 in that 1928 win over the Caribbean tourists.
Wales' next significant appearances came in the 1979 ICC Trophy, a competition for which they had not actually had to qualify but instead appeared to make up the numbers because several ICC members had not entered the competition. Playing in Group 3, they had a reasonable tournament, opening with a win over the Netherlands in a rain-affected game and also beating Israel; they lost to the USA by eight runs and their game against Sri Lanka was abandoned without a ball being bowled.
Wales took part in the Triple Crown Tournament between 1993 and 2001; this was a competition involving Wales, Scotland, Ireland and an amateur England XI. They had little success, however, never finishing out of the bottom two in the points table. From 2002 to 2004 Wales played a 50-over challenge match against England each June. In the first of these games they recorded a shock eight-wicket victory, with Steve James making 83 not out, though the other two games went to England. Wales' team consisted mostly of Welsh cricketers, although there were a scattering of non-Welsh Glamorgan players such as Michael Kasprowicz and Dean Cosker.
In 1988, a Wales Minor Counties team under the control of the Welsh Cricket Association, the governing body for amateur cricket in Wales made its first appearance in the Holt Cup, a one-day tournament for minor-county teams. Since then, the Wales MC side has appeared regularly in the NatWest Trophy (and its successor, the C&G Trophy) as well as in the Minor Counties Championship, their most notable result probably the seven-wicket win over Denmark in the first round of the 2004 C&G Trophy (which due to the vagaries of the schedule was actually played in August 2003).