Lives in Cricket No 2 - Johnny Briggs

appearance for Lancashire in a non-championship match against Cheshire at Stockport in the same month. After that he disappeared from the county scene and ended up playing club cricket locally, turning out for East Lancashire, Church and Colne. Out of the Lancashire side, Crossland didn’t play at first-class level again for Nottinghamshire either. Not that they needed him: they had the best bowling line-up in the championship and were awarded the title by the unanimous vote of all the relevant cricket journals. Cue Briggs stage right – and he was quick to seize the opportunity presented to him by Lancashire’s loss of two of their front-line bowlers. After all, he had been waiting in the wings long enough. Soon he was showing what Wisden was to describe as ‘a capacity for bowling of the highest order’. His bowling career never looked back. Against Oxford University in mid-June, he gave his colleagues – and Lancashire’s supporters – a taste of what was to become standard fare, taking eleven wickets, scattering the lower order in both innings. He took eight wickets in the match against Sussex at Hove; twelve against MCC at Lord’s in July and 9 for 29 in 42 overs, the best return of his career to date, in Derbyshire’s second innings on a drying pitch in blustery conditions at Derby in the first week of August. He consolidated his reputation with 15 for 57 in a minor two-day match against Cheshire and 6 for 34 in the second innings of a similar fixture against Essex at Leyton. In Lancashire’s final two first-class matches of the season, he opened the bowling with Watson and took five in an innings against both Gloucestershire and Surrey. His overall return for the season in all first-class cricket was 67 wickets at an average of 13.74, which put him ahead of any other regularly performing bowler in the land, with eight five-wickets-in-an-innings hauls. In Lancashire’s last eight county matches, he took 44 wickets. In the preceding 54 county matches in which he had played, Briggs had taken only 15 wickets. Put simply, Briggs had arrived as a bowler. Although neither Nash nor Crossland were ever called for throwing, that fate did befall a colleague of Briggs in this season. George Jowett, an amateur from Prescot playing in his first match, against Surrey at Liverpool, was no-balled by umpire John Platts in one of his two four-ball overs in the visitors’ second innings. Jowett, who played mainly as a batsman in nineteen matches for the Red Rose county, appears to have been brought in as a fast 32 Coming of age as a cricketer