Liam Herringshaw
In which we go back over a century to the fiendish excitements of Newfoundland cricket in its heyday
Everyone wants to win. Claiming otherwise when playing or watching sport is to render the activity meaningless. To really win, however, you need to have lost before. And to appreciate your victories properly, you need to have lost a lot. This is something that supporters of Australia are beginning to understand, and that perhaps the followers of Argentinian soccer team River Plate will soon recognise too.

Whatever nadir your team might currently be stuck in, don’t be disheartened. Various studies have shown that organisations learn an awful lot more from failure than from success. Just ask the cricket-lovers of Newfoundland & Labrador, who can perhaps regard themselves as the most learned and appreciative of sports fans. As I noted in the previous postcard, the two victories recorded by Cricket NL at the recent Atlantic Twenty20 Cup broke almost two centuries of mediocrity.

What, then, were Newfoundland’s cricketing highlights across the previous 187 years? What memorable incidents, or crumbs of comfort, had followers of the game been able to find prior to 2011? With the help of the lovely Linda and Frances, sports archivists in The Rooms, the province’s excellent museum, I panned the rivers of newspaper cuttings to pluck out a selection of the choicest nuggets.
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