Sport
Blenheim Park Cricket Club
Blenheim Park Cricket Club vs Exeter College, Oxford - 28 June 2026 The origins of cricket at Blenheim are lost in the mists of time, and are likely to remain so. But there is some evidence suggesting that organised cricket was being played there as early as the middle of the nineteenth century. A copy of a scorecard emerged in recent years of a game played at the Palace on Friday 12th June 1846, with Blenheim Park Cricket Club hosting a team from Exeter College, Oxford. We can presume that the hosting team consisted mostly of people employed to work on the Palace estate, although the one home player from that match that can be traced with any certainty is Frank Bowcher Wright, a talented cricketer who had represented Oxford University in his youth. By 1846 he was thirty-eight years old and serving as curate at Church Hanborough. The students included among their number the twenty-year-old Charles du Cane, later MP for North Essex, and later still Governor of Tasmania. The match was one-sided, with scores low even by the standards of the era. Exeter were dismissed for a pitiful 15 runs in their first innings, with Wright taking eight wickets, all of them bowled. Blenheim Park responded with 175, after which the students were rolled over for 69 in their second knock, giving the home team a win by an innings and 91 runs. Du Cane bagged a pair, a fact unlikely to have featured in his reminiscences of college years when lording over Government House in Hobart decades later. When the scorecard of that match was discovered a few years ago, it was resolved to mark the 180th anniversary with a return fixture, and with no record of the teams having met in the interim, it might mark the longest gap between matches of the same opponents in cricketing history. So it was that, on 28th June 2026, a troupe of blazered students strode purposefully onto the South Lawn - remarkably early for students on a weekend - presumably itching to avenge the heavy defeat suffered by their scholarly forebears. Cordialities were exchanged, photos were taken in a variety of fetching poses, and the home side were asked to bat by the toss-winning Exeter College captain. Unlike the previous game, this match was played as a limited-overs affair, and the hosts ran up an imposing 268-8 off their allotted 50 overs, with Finn Spearman contributing a superb, undefeated 134, the highest individual innings for the club in many years. The students’ reply began well, with Talha Siddiq punishing any wayward bowling, but he couldn’t find colleagues to keep him company for long, and when he fell to the persevering septuagenarian Nigel Walker for a splendid 94, the innings petered out for 227, with Walker and Rohan Gupta each bagging three wickets. Thus, Blenheim Park maintained their 100% record in the fixture, and repaired in good spirits to the Back Lane Tavern, looking forward to the next centoctogesimal anniversary match, in 2206. Result:Blenheim Park CC 268F Spearman 134; T Macfarlane 3-51 Exeter College CC 227T Siddiq 94; N Walker 3-41, R Gupta 3-44 BPCC won by 41 runs bold textAllan Engel
By Allan Engel · 24 August 2026
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