Lives in Cricket No 2 - Johnny Briggs

produced some remarkable analyses on the tour, including match figures of 16 for 66 v Queensland Eighteen at Brisbane. At the end of the tour Briggs was owed £60 by Shaw and Shrewsbury, whose finances were by now in some disarray. Briggs had to wait for his money as did some of the amateurs who were due even larger sums. Briggs arrived back in England just in time for the 1888 domestic season, in which he scored, in all his first-class matches, 872 runs at 21.26, including one century and four 50s and took 160 wickets at 10.49 with 16 five-wicket hauls, four times claiming ten in a match. Although his county had a poor season against other counties, he was instrumental in helping Lancashire defeat a strong Australian side at Old Trafford, returning figures of 4 for 34 and 5 for 15. Briggs’ all-round displays saw him finish third among his fellow professionals in the national batting averages and second in the bowling averages. With 648 runs, he was the county’s leading scorer for the second time in his career. The City News reporter, employing the sort of hyperbole which is prevalent in the sports pages of some of today’s tabloids, said of his bowling skills: ‘The way in which he breaks his first ball from an impossible distance from the off, his second ball from an equally impossible distance from the leg, and then comes a perfectly straight one, as fast as Spofforth’s fastest, must be watched to be believed. No wonder batters give him up in despair.’ His performances earned him the accolade of one of the first set of Wisden ’s cricketers of the year. Briggs was chosen along with Lohmann and Peel and the Australian trio of John Ferris, Charlie Turner and Sammy Woods, all of them bowlers. The following year, Wisden continued the theme choosing no fewer than nine batsmen. In his preface to the 1889 Wisden , the editor, Charles Pardon, wrote that to mark the extraordinary success of the sextet, the Almanack was including their six portraits specially taken by the leading cricket photographers, Messrs Hawkins of Brighton. Wisden ’s notes on Briggs said ‘he has been justly regarded as one of the most able and destructive bowlers in the country’. Between them in eleven-a-side cricket in 1888 (not all first-class), they took 1,272 wickets at an average cost of 11.89. Turner alone had 314 victims. In first-class cricket the six of them had between them snared 1,109 wickets at a combined average of 12.43. Clearly, they were the six leading bowlers in the world at that time. Taking a hundred wickets for the first time 42