Having been an avid cricket fan in Ireland from a young age I realised early on that the cricket community in Ireland was small and tight knit. With each year that passed one would regularly encounter the same familiar faces be it at Ireland games or during the domestic league season. As a result of this I guess I had always taken it for granted that cricket was a so called “minority sport” in Ireland, a phrase that I still intensely dislike as it assumes a degree of inferiority to the sport.
However it was during a college lecture in UCD that the lecturer mentioned in passing a remark about how cricket was for one fleeting moment the most popular sport in Ireland during the early to mid 1870s. To say that I was shocked to hear that fact is an understatement, I even remember mentioning this to some of my friends and fellow students later that day. To a response of disbelief as I was told that I must be mistaken and that I must be confusing cricket with hurling. It was then that I decided to do some more research into the history of Irish cricket to see if I could uncover the full story behind Irish crickets past popularity, while hopefully proving my claims to my associates in the process.
I had never planned to write a thesis on the history of Irish cricket, but having opted to carry out a Masters, I thought it might make an interesting subject especially during a time when cricket in Ireland was growing in popularity thanks to the burgeoning success of the Irish national team at the 2007, 2011 and 2015 cricket world cups. When I ran the idea past my thesis coordinator Dr Paul Rouse, he thought it would make an excellent thesis topic and so it was decided.
The thesis itself focuses on the history of Irish cricket in the 1870s and will track the rise and decline of the game in Ireland during this decade and the reasons behind this phenomenon. I hope that the thesis will serve to further educate people with regards to the history of the game, and will go to show the status that cricket once held in Ireland and how vital it is to remove the veil of what Patrick Bracken has termed “historical amnesia”, away from this aspect of Ireland’s sporting history that has remained hidden and forgotten for years.
The thesis itself will be released on the LCU website in three chapters, over the next three weeks so as to lighten the load for any interested readers. Like all stories this one must start at the beginning, as such this first chapter addresses the origins of cricket in England and its early growth there, before tracking its arrival in Ireland and the early spread of the game here. Focusing upon how the game slowly spread across the country and the first Irish cricket clubs that helped to make this possible. I hope you all enjoy reading this thesis as much as I did writing it.
Adam Darnell.