The National Counties, known as the Minor Counties before 2020, are the cricketing counties of England and Wales that do not have first-class status. The game is administered by the National Counties Cricket Association (NCCA), which comes under the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB). There are currently twenty teams in National Counties cricket: nineteen representing historic counties of England, plus the Wales National County Cricket Club. Of the 39 historic counties of England, 17 have a first-class county cricket team (the 18th first-class county is Glamorgan in Wales) and 18 participate in the National Counties championship. Since 2021, Cumberland and Westmorland have been represented by Cumbria in the National Counties championship, while the remaining two historic counties, Huntingdonshire and Rutland, have associations with other counties (Huntingdonshire with Cambridgeshire and Rutland with Leicestershire). Despite this, Huntingdonshire has its own Cricket Board, and took part in the English domestic one-day competition between 1999 and 2003. The Isle of Wight, historically a part of Hampshire but now a county in its own right, also has its own Cricket Board. From 2020, the Minor Counties were rebranded as the National Counties Cricket Association. History The Minor Counties, i.e. those not afforded first-class status, formed their own Championship from 1895. In the early years, the results of matches against teams that played not enough games to qualify for the final table were included in the records of those who did. For example, Cambridgeshire played only Norfolk. Five notionally Second Class county clubs – Essex, Warwickshire, Derbyshire, Hampshire and Leicestershire – joined the County Championship for the first time (some of them had had periods of being considered first-class before the Championship was constituted as such). Four further Minor Counties have since been granted first-class status – Worcestershire in 1899, Northamptonshire in 1905, Glamorgan in 1921 and Durham in 1992. The second XIs of the first-class counties competed in the Minor Counties Championship from its early days and Lancashire Second XI won the Championship title in 1907. For 10 years before and 15 years after the Second World War, the first-class county second XIs frequently won the Minor Counties title, but after 1959, when the counties set up their own Second XI competition, fewer contested the Minor Counties games. Yorkshire Second XI was the last second XI winner of the title in 1971, and Somerset Second XI was the last to compete, withdrawing after the