Gloucestershire County Cricket Club League in 2000. Cricket probably reached Gloucestershire by the end of the 17th century. It is known that the related sport of "Stow-Ball" "aka" "Stob-Ball" was played in the county during the 16th century. In this game, the bat was called a "stave". See Alice B Gomme : "The Traditional Games of England, Scotland and Ireland". A game in Gloucester on 22 September 1729 is the earliest definite reference to cricket in the county. From then until the founding of the county club, very little has been found outside parish cricket. In the early 1840s, Dr Henry Grace and his
Variations in published cricket statistics 17 May 1895, in the Gloucestershire v Somerset match at County Cricket Ground, Bristol, Sammy Woods bowled a slow full toss, perhaps deliberately, which W. G. Grace dispatched to the boundary. Woods walked down the pitch and shook hands with the great man who had just completed his hundredth hundred, a century of centuries. It was an occasion for celebration: poems were written, commemorative plates were produced, Grace’s health was widely toasted. WG went on to make 126 career centuries. At the time, it was widely if not universally accepted that Grace's list of centuries included a score of 152