Lives in Cricket No 2 - Johnny Briggs

a fine player; he had the reputation of being a bowler who assisted the umpires by not appealing for impossibilities. He was the finest fielder at cover-point I have seen; his anticipation of a batsman’s stroke was great, while his agility enabled him to keep up his form almost to the end of his career.’ But perhaps Briggs was best summed up just 48 hours after his untimely death by his local newspaper, the Manchester Guardian , which wrote: ‘Briggs for twenty years has been the very life of the cricket field. He has given cause of merriment, of surprise, of admiration to countless thousands of people. No bowler has had more cunning than he; none has shone more brightly in the place at cover slip; and before he became a great bowler he was famous as a batsman and till the very end of his career was never indifferent in that department of the game. He was an all-round player in the sense that Lohmann and Peel have been and that A.G.Steel was. He had his faults in a way that A.N.Hornby had his. In a way he played to the ‘gallery’. He made a pretty presence with the bat, in the field and in bowling.’ And what did Briggs think about Briggs? In an interview in 1891, he said: ‘I suppose I was really played for my batting in the first instance but I have always thought myself a better bowler than bat. Then, when a cricketer has been bowling any length of time and taking a responsible position in the field as cover point, he cannot be expected to make much off the bat.’ ‘I always feels satisfied if I come out first or second in the bowling analysis and have an average of 20-odd runs at the end of the season; that ought to be a satisfactory result for anybody.’ Briggs must have been pretty satisfied with his achievements – he averaged more than 20 with the bat eleven times and topped the Lancashire bowling averages on seven occasions. Eleven times he took more than 100 wickets in a season – a club record. Next in line is Dick Tyldesley with ten instances. Briggs was Lancashire’s leading wicket-taker with 1,696 until overtaken by Brian Statham who reached 1,816 by the time of his retirement in 1968. There is no doubt that Briggs had a shrewd cricketing brain and as he once put it: ‘It’s not what ah do, it’s what t’others think ah do as matters.’ So, starting as a fieldsman, becoming a batsman who could bowl and then a bowler who could bat, Briggs is difficult to categorise. However, unlike most sports, cricket throws up a veritable What are we to make of him? 91