Lives in Cricket No 2 - Johnny Briggs

after playing only eight times, every player appeared in virtually every game, although Briggs missed out on one of the odds fixtures, against Armidale XXII in northern New South Wales on 2 March because of injury. He didn’t play in either of the two matches which followed that fixture, with Lillywhite standing in for him in the games at Ashfield, also in New South Wales, and Wellington in South Australia. At one stage, English professionals Robert Henderson, of Surrey and George Hearne, an MCC ground bowler, who were already in Australia, were co-opted into the side for three matches, as injuries from the uneven outfields and poor pitches began to mount up. The tour was certainly no sinecure with 33 matches played on Australian soil and one at Port Said over the course of a punishing 84 playing days – sometimes in wintry weather, other times in almost unbearable heat. In one game the post-lunch restart was delayed because of the high temperature. Eight of these matches, the only eleven-a-side games they played, were treated as first-class by the press and later by statisticians: the arrangements were that these would be played to a finish in accordance with the established local custom. Five of them, against the Combined Australian XI – Australia then comprised of separate colonies – were treated as international matches of importance and later canonised as Test matches. Three other matches played eleven-a-side were against New South Wales and Victoria. Twenty five matches, mostly limited to two days, were played against odds – fifteens, eighteens and twenty-twos – most of them in country towns away from the colonial capitals. To fulfil this fixture list, which involved matches in four colonies – South Australia, Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland – Shaw and Shrewsbury’s caravan zig-zagged over much of the inhabited eastern half of Australia, stopping in hotels of variable quality and travelling as far north as Maryborough in Queensland, more than 100 miles beyond Brisbane. The journeys between matches were made by train, horse-drawn road vehicles and coastal steamships, and totalled in excess of 8,000 miles, with some fixtures almost 500 miles apart. The batting surfaces were as varied as their modes of transport with the tourists encountering matting, concrete, bare earth and turf pitches which differed greatly in quality and preparation. A combination of fatigue, minor injuries and sheer weight of numbers meant that Shaw and Shrewsbury’s team won only ten of 24 Touring Australia for the first time