Milnrow Cricket Club


Milnrow Cricket Club, based in Milnrow, an area of the Metropolitan Borough of Rochdale, Greater Manchester, are an English cricket team who as of 2011 play in the Central Lancashire League.
The club is over 150 years old and celebrated its centenary in 1957 with the publication of a club history. The first professional player for the club was James Rigby, in 1884, but the club has never had a great deal of sporting success when compared to its local rivals. It was a founder member of the CLCL in 1892.
In 2010 the club received a £57,000 grant from the England & Wales Cricket Board. This was towards the costs of providing artificial practice areas for coaching purposes. Earlier in that year it had also received a smaller grant from Sport England. It has also received funding from, for example, the Co-op.
The club has a junior section and has in the past developed players who have been selected for the Academy of Lancashire Cricket Club, which exists to further develop young talent with the aim of seeing its members become professional players.

Past professionals

Despite its modest record in the league, Milnrow has attracted some top Test players and former county cricket players as its professionals. Former players for the team include the Australian all-rounder George Tribe, the county spinners Albert Rhodes and John McMahon, former Lancashire captain Ken Grieves, the West Indies Test player Derick Parry, the Zimbabwean Kevin Curran and the Indian bowler Chetan Sharma. Its most recent Test player to act as a professional was Paul Wiseman, the New Zealand off-spin bowler in 2005.
The record wicket-taker in a single season was Tribe, whose 148 wickets in 1949 were a record at the time for the Central Lancashire League ; the historian of the Leagues, John Kay, wrote that Tribe "suffered badly from indifferent fielding" at Milnrow.