Cricket, lovely cricket - 8 March 2018

Written by Adrian Burrows and researched by John Rodgers.

Although very much the poor relation for professional sport in Hull, when compared to football and rugby league there have been several professional fixtures played in the region which have featured players of African heritage. These games were played at The Circle, Anlaby Road, a ground now more familiarly known as the KCOM stadium home to Hull City and Hull FC.

Professional cricket was played at the ground between 1899 and 1990 and was used by Yorkshire County Cricket Club as one of its home venues. The county operated a very strict policy of selecting Yorkshire born players and only relaxed the rules to allow cricketers born outside of the county to play in 1992 when Sachin Tendulkar, the 19-year-old Indian test player, became the first overseas player to join the county. A year later, Yorkshire signed Richie Richardson, the then West Indies captain, as an overseas player - but were no longer playing at the Circle at this time.

As a consequence of this policy the only opportunity to see players of African descent arose when they appeared for visiting teams.

The first player to appear was Jamaican born Ron Headley who represented Worcestershire in two 3-day county championship games in 1967 and 1974 respectively. Headley was a West Indian cricketer who moved to England in 1950 when his father George played professionally at Dudley cricket club in the Birmingham League. George played 22 times for the West Indies and Ron's son Dean went on to play 15 Tests and 13 One Day Internationals for England – the first case of 3 consecutive generations of the same family playing Test cricket.

Ron Headley went on to represent the West Indies on 3 occasions during their tour of England in 1973.

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​The second player to appear was Barbados born, Keith Boyce who represented Essex in a 3-day county championship match in August 1971. Boyce played 21 times for the West Indies, touring England in 1973 and 1975 and was part of the successful West Indian side that won the inaugural World Cup in 1975.

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​Arguably the most famous player of African descent to play at the Circle was Sir Garfield Sobers. He made his First-Class debut for Barbados aged only 16, and his Test debut the following year. In 1958, in scoring his first Test century against Pakistan, he went on to 365 not out – a world record not beaten until 1994. He was West Indies captain from 1965 to 1972, and captained a Rest of the World side against England in 1970. He played 93 Tests for West Indies, scoring over 8,000 runs. His most celebrated appearance was playing for Nottinghamshire against Glamorgan, when he hit six 6s in one over for the first time in first class cricket.

Two other notable players to appear were Barbados born Wayne Daniel, part of the famous West Indian pace attack of 1976, who played for Middlesex against Yorkshire in May 1983 and Guyana-born Chris Lewis who went on to qualify and play for England at test level. Lewis played for Leicestershire in a one-day game in July 1988.

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​One other game of note that was organised by Sir Roy Marshall (read our feature on Roy), the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Hull was between Yorkshire and the touring West Indian cricket team as part of the 1983 events in Hull to mark the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. The game also served as a warm-up for the West Indies ahead of that year’s World Cup held in England. In the event because the proposed Yorkshire side included Geoffrey Boycott and Arnie Sidebottom, two players who had participated in an unauthorised tour of apartheid era South Africa, the West Indies refused to play the game and it had to be cancelled.