Cricket played for 150 years before anyone officially decided what first-class meant
Cricket scorecards survive from as early as 1744, but the label first-class only became official for matches starting in May 1895, and only in Britain. A worldwide definition waited until 1947, and it pointedly refused to reach backwards, leaving statisticians to argue over which earlier games should count.
Before then, first-class was a loose compliment, used alongside words like great, important and major, and people disagreed about which matches earned it. Wisden reckoned the phrase only became established around 1880. That same year the Cricket Reporting Agency was founded, and through its ties to Wisden it became the voice the press trusted on such questions. Two 1882 writers covering Alfred Shaw's tour of Australia and New Zealand even produced different lists of which tour games were first-class.
County clubs multiplied in the 1860s, when only four had formal constitutions and Sussex, from 1839, was the oldest. A May 1894 meeting at Lord's between the Marylebone Cricket Club and the County Championship clubs settled the matter for Britain. Officially, the first first-class match was MCC against Nottinghamshire at Lord's on 1 and 2 May 1895, which MCC won by 37 runs.
Test matches had a similarly informal start. The South Australian journalist Clarence P. Moody drew up the first list of Tests in an 1894 book, beginning with Australia against England in Melbourne on 15–17 March 1877. His 39 games, plus four more, were later accepted as Tests and so as first-class too.
The Imperial Cricket Conference, today's International Cricket Council, fixed the global rule on 19 May 1947: a match of at least three days between two elevens deemed first-class by each country's governing body. It has since bent its no-backdating rule twice, extending first-class status to women's cricket in November 2021 and allowing matches to lose the status if substitute rules were broken.
Source: First-class cricket
