Lives in Cricket No 24 - Edgar Willsher

19 the boundary as back-up. Bowlers like Jackson and Willsher would occasionally get batsman out stumped, 5 but there must have been at least as many occasions when the ball eluded the keeper and was retrieved by the longstop. No doubt Willsher’s pace seemed greater in his day because of the treacherous conditions, and the fact is that he bowled as fast as he needed to in order to take wickets. The secret of Willsher’s success, however, lay in more than just his pace. Caffyn, referring to Jackson and Tarrant, opines that ‘his ball was a more difficult one than those of either of those famous cricketers’. He goes on to say that he moved the ball a good deal from leg to off, ‘and he seemed to have the knack of being able to make a ball “get up” on almost any wicket.’ Writing in Cricket magazine, again in 1893, Daft gives us our best insight into exactly how this was achieved: He came up to the wicket with a quick-march kind of step; raised his hand high above his head, bringing it down, however, with a very quick jerky movement just as he delivered. That last movement of his seemed to put a spin on the ball that caused it to rise like lightning from the pitch. It seemed to reach one almost before it left his hand sometimes. I always found that I could play back more successfully than forward, although until one got used to him it was difficult to believe this could be done. Willsher was always a bowler that one was glad to see taken off if one were batting against him, and were well set even. One never knew what might happen, as he had so many nasty balls ‘up his sleeve’ which often produced disastrous results. The Laws of Cricket at the time of Willsher’s county debut stated that the bowler’s arm had to stay below shoulder height in delivery, and this was to prove the bane of Willsher’s professional life. However, we are not concerned with the height of his arm at this stage of the story, but the fact that bowling could at most be round-arm in 1850 meant that, because of the angle involved, the majority of its practitioners bowled from round the wicket. We do not have specific information on Willsher, but, assuming he also adopted this line of attack, it would have accentuated the difficulty of playing what was essentially a fast leg-break to the right-handed batsman. Combined with the extra bounce that his action seemed to generate, and the under-prepared state of contemporary wickets, the batsman would assuredly have felt 5 Willsher obtained 28 wickets by stumpings, some perhaps in matches where he reverted to traditional under-arm ‘lob’ deliveries, and Jackson 11. Methods