Lives in Cricket No 24 - Edgar Willsher

21 contemporaries, and I set out below a table looking at a small selection of his peers. I have chosen the three great speedsters mentioned above, plus Tom Emmett of Yorkshire, perhaps, after Willsher, the greatest left-arm fast bowler of the time; Alfred Shaw of Nottinghamshire, renowned for his extreme miserliness with the ball; and the slow bowler James Southerton, whose career almost completely overlapped with Willsher’s. For convenience the table is laid out in order by start of playing career: Bowler Career Wickets Avge E.R. S.R. E.Willsher 1850-1875 1329 12.78 30.96 41.10 J.Southerton 1854-1879 1682 14.43 35.22 40.97 J.Jackson 1855-1867 655 11.52 35.96 32.04 G.F.Tarrant 1860-1869 421 11.89 36.01 33.01 A.Shaw 1864-1897 2027 12.13 24.10 50.32 G.Freeman 1865-1880 288 9.84 27.76 35.47 T.Emmett 1866-1888 1572 13.55 35.44 38.25 Notes: Economy rate (E.R.) refers to runs conceded per 100 balls, and strike rate (S.R.) to balls bowled per wicket taken. Source: www. cricketarchive.com . While clearly far from a comprehensive or scientific survey, we can at least see that Edgar was a match for any of his peers. Only Shaw and Freeman have better economy rates, and only Freeman is superior on both penetration and economy. The latter’s incredible figures were also achieved over a much shorter career of 44 first- class matches. Whilst Willsher’s strike rate is not as impressive as that of Jackson, Tarrant or Freeman, it is still competitive, and vastly superior to Shaw’s, although he was a different sort of bowler. It should be noted that Southerton, Shaw and Emmett all played in the first-ever Test match in Melbourne in March 1877, and we can be certain that the ‘Lion of Kent’, as Daft and others liked to call him, referring to his position as the successor to the title once held by Alfred Mynn, would have been invited to take part if he had still been available. From surviving photographs and descriptions, Willsher seems to have had a fragile physique, so he must have been stronger than he looked. In 1865, at age 37, he gave his height as 5 ft 11 in and his weight as 11 st 3 lb, which gives him, in modern terminology, a Body Mass Index of 21.9, well within the ‘normal’ range between 18.5 and 24.9, but many of his fellow players, like Sussex’s John Wisden, 11 st 4 lb at just 5 ft 4½ in, returned an ‘overweight’ BMI, of 26.9 in his case. Lord Harris saw Willsher as ‘an attenuated, consumptive-looking man’ while Daft preferred Methods