Earliest Recorded Cricket at Trinity College, Cambridge — May 1805

Both Cambridge and Oxford had informal cricket through the eighteenth century. The 1805 Cambridge match is the earliest with surviving documentation.

Cricket had been played at Cambridge informally since at least the 1750s, but no documentary evidence of organised inter-college cricket survives before 1805. The Trinity v St John's match was the first to be reported in a college diary — that of John Strange, a Trinity undergraduate who later became a clergyman in Norfolk. He recorded the result as a Trinity win by an innings, with a 41 from a Trinity batter named Crawford. Parker's Piece had been common land of the city since the seventeenth century; the match used a flat strip on the eastern edge.

Inter-college cricket grew steadily through the 1810s. The first Cambridge University match against an outside side came in 1817; the first University Match against Oxford came in 1827.