Lives in Cricket No 24 - Edgar Willsher

40 Incident at The Oval on the part of John Lillywhite, threw down the ball and walked towards the dressing-room, followed by the rest of the players. In an instant all was confusion and excitement. Cheers were raised for Willsher, and counter-cheers for Lillywhite, who remained in the field, till the time for drawing the stumps had arrived, surrounded by thousands of the spectators. In fact, the two England amateurs, Walker and C.G.Lyttelton of Cambridge University, stayed on the field with Lillywhite, as they could not be seen to condone the intemperate acts of a bunch of professionals. Walker’s biographer, Walter Bettesworth, later explained: When the incident happened he spoke to Willsher, who was, however, so exasperated and beside himself that he would not listen to reason, and walked away, the other professionals following him instantly. Now if the captain had gone after them to try to persuade them to return it is clear that this action would have been misunderstood. He would have given the impression that he was, like the professionals, leaving the field to express his feelings, and, although he might have returned, the mischief would have been done, and the effect would have been lamentable. Bell’s Life suggested that Willsher could have finished the over by bowling under-arm, and Walker himself claimed that, if he had known that Lillywhite intended to no-ball the Kent man, he would have put him on at the other end where Tom Sewell senior was presiding. This certainly worked for Arjuna Ranatunga when Muttiah Muralitharan was no-balled by Darrell Hair at Melbourne’s Boxing Day Test of 1995. Just as in 1862, the crowd at first had no idea what was going on when Hair started no-balling Muralitharan, but after seven calls it was perfectly clear. Ranatunga went off to consult the match referee and duly moved his prize bowler Law 10 as enacted at the time of The Oval incident, from a contemporary handbook. Its equivalent in the fourth edition of the 2000 code, Law 24, has some 400 words relating to ‘fair delivery and the arm’, including ‘Underarm bowling shall not be permitted except by special agreement before the match.’