Lives in Cricket No 24 - Edgar Willsher

51 he, ‘with H.H.Stephenson, is manager of the newly established “English Eleven”.’ Stephenson had been the captain of the first side to tour Australia in 1861/62, and was aware that George Parr’s team was not due back from the antipodes until mid-June 1864. As a lot of the squad were from the two main national elevens, he and Willsher decided to plug the early-season gap with a team made up from those left behind in England. The venture was extremely short-lived, with only three fixtures before the Australian touring party returned home, and the ‘English Eleven’ was never heard of again. The USEE, on the other hand, was a long-term project, and took up a lot of Willsher’s time throughout the decade. The culmination of all his hard work came in 1870, when, after the demise of the AEE v UEE match in 1869, a game was organised between the USEE and a ‘United North of England Eleven’ (UNEE) at Lord’s. Although a cricketing flop, with the UNEE winning easily in two days by an innings, it did manage, in the words of the Times , ‘to heal a long-standing breach among the players’. At last the worst was over, and cricket once again had reason to be very thankful to ‘dear old Ned Willsher’. Perhaps all the extra work involved in running the USEE had some effect on his own form, for in three seasons between 1865 and 1867, Willsher’s bowling average was a relatively high 14.38 for 150 first-class wickets. 15 Certainly, Alfred Lubbock, the old Etonian and Kentish amateur, writing in Wisden in 1909, felt that he ‘slowed down a good deal’ after being forced to lower his arm, and he never seems to have regained his former liveliness. In its obituary piece, Bell’s Life described Willsher as ‘medium pace’, and the writer must surely have only seen his subject in the later stages of his career, for nowhere else is he downgraded to this extent. There were still some prodigious feats though, both of wicket- taking and economy. Chief among them was his performance for England at the end of July 1866, again against Surrey at The Oval. In a match made famous by the eighteen-year-old W.G. Grace’s double of scoring his first first-class hundred (224 not out) and then winning the 440 yards hurdles at Crystal Palace on the same evening, Willsher calmly took seven wickets in the match for just 38 runs off 41 overs, 26 of which were maidens. Even more outstanding was his bowling for the USEE at Southgate in 1867. Against a decent batting line-up, he started his second innings spell with 13 successive maidens, and at one time he had bowled 27 successive overs for just two runs. W.H.Knight, the 15 Wickets cost on average 16.87 over these three seasons. Overarm at Last