Lives in Cricket No 24 - Edgar Willsher

46 accepted this when he wrote in Boy’s Own Magazine in the same year that ‘we know now that he can bowl good balls – perhaps with more spin and bias – when he bowls low.’ Bell’s Life provided a worrying footnote to its report of the match, won by the UEE by 70 runs, when it said that Law 10 ‘was not strictly enforced in one or two cases’, so the situation was still no closer to being properly resolved. Willsher had a decent enough season in 1863, taking 80 wickets in matches which we now treat as first-class. In spite, or perhaps because, of the controversy now surrounding his name, he had his best season with the bat, scoring 494 runs in seventeen matches at an average of 17.64 in a year when wickets cost 15.82 each. He recorded his highest score in first-class cricket, 89, batting at five in Kent’s first innings at Sandgate Hill, near Folkestone, in only the second first-class match played on the ground. 12 12 His innings was the highest individual score in the match and it has remained the ground first-class record. Overarm at Last Willsher, aged 34, as pictured by the Illustrated Sporting News at the end of the 1863 season. Despite his ‘faraway look’ his seventeen first-class matches this year brought him 494 runs and 80 wickets.