Lives in Cricket No 24 - Edgar Willsher

18 Chapter Four Methods It may be appropriate at this point to take stock and consider what qualities as a cricketer Edgar possessed that made him ‘a bud of promise’, who would more than fulfil The Era ’s prediction in sustaining a hugely successful career over a quarter of a century. Such longevity in itself was remarkable for a pace bowler, but there is also the small matter of how he managed to take 1,290 first-class wickets at an average of 12.78, in addition to 39 wickets for which no analyses have been preserved. For pace bowler he certainly was; already in 1849 the Kentish Gazette was calling him ‘fast’, and this was a verdict confirmed by his contemporaries. Richard Daft, the classy Nottinghamshire batsman whose career stretched from 1858 to 1891, said in his 1893 book Kings of Cricket that he had ‘tremendous pace’, whilst the great allrounder William Caffyn, who played for Surrey from 1849 to 1873, said ‘he was not so fast as either Jackson or Tarrant’. John ‘Foghorn’ Jackson of Nottinghamshire, and George ‘Tear ‘em’ Tarrant of Cambridgeshire, together with Yorkshire’s George Freeman, were the most celebrated bowlers of express pace in Willsher’s day, and so to be talked of in the same breath in terms of speed indicates that Willsher was genuinely quick. To put it in context, although we cannot be sure of the velocity of bowlers from 150 years ago, a ‘fast’ bowler in the modern game such as Andrew Flintoff will regularly reach speeds of just over 90 miles per hour, while a ‘very fast’ bowler will touch 95 or above. In his biography of Fred Spofforth, the ‘demon’ Australian bowler, Richard Cashman estimates that he bowled at about the pace of Alec Bedser (a maximum of fast-medium), because he regularly had batsmen out stumped. This may well be the case, but in the slightly earlier era in which Willsher played, all wicketkeepers stood up to the stumps, so pace cannot be judged by quite the same criteria. Even Jackson had batsman stumped off his bowling, but this does not necessarily mean that he was not ‘fast’. Because of the unpredictable nature of the wickets, wicketkeeping in the middle of the nineteenth century was a lottery, and there would always be a longstop, very often one of the more able fielders, near