Lives in Cricket No 50 - Tom Emmett

123 generations, and it is true that he had limited opportunities (and success) in Test cricket, but year-in, year-out, for more than 25 years, Emmett took wickets in large quantities in decent quality cricket matches at very low cost. Put simply, he was a match winner, and remarkably his workload and his success increased in his forties. Indeed, he bowled more and took more wickets aged 44 than at any other point of his first-class career. Contemporaries admired and feared TomEmmett’s bowling and recognised his worth. W.A.Bettesworth called him ‘a genius’ and said that he could bowl balls ‘which no man had ever seen or dreamed of before’. At the same time, he believed that, what he called, Emmett’s ‘want of method’ stopped him from being the very greatest bowler of his day. 96 Nevertheless, he was an exceptional left-handed, round-arm fast bowler, who started off at a ‘stinging’ pace, and slowed down to medium as he aged. In 1905, Wisden commented that he was perhaps: the only instance of a great fast bowler who was skilful enough to remain effective after he had lost his pace. Those who only saw him bowl in the latter parts of his career, when his main object was to get chances on the off side, can have no idea of what he was like when he first won fame on the cricket field. His speed for five or six years was tremendous, and every now and then he would send down an unplayable ball that pitched on the leg stump and broke back nearly the width of the wicket. 97 Emmett’s slowing-up in pace happened gradually, but by 1880 he had taken to bowling much slower according to Lillywhite’s Annual . Three years later, it was noted that he had reduced his pace again in 1882. 98 In 1906, however, Cricket suggested that he had got faster again in his later years, without ever recovering the pace of his days in partnership with George Freeman. Emmett himself said that his bowling action came naturally, but it was clearly a complex process. An article in The Sportsman in 1877 described his approach, noting his ‘delivery is very awkward as he brings the ball round with a sweep, and he bowls round the wicket so very wide that he is especially difficult to see....when you are least expecting it there comes a trimmer, which whips from the leg to the off like lightning.’ Scores and Biographies noted that he was a ‘high, fast, left, round-armed bowler with a sweeping delivery’. As he ran up to the wicket ‘his arm did so many eccentric things that it was not easy for a batsman to see when the ball left his hand.’ 99 Another description of his run-up talked of his hand shaking just before he delivered the ball. Lyttleton too commented that: He had an odd, corkscrewy sort of action, took a long run, and had a most extraordinary action of the left elbow, and neither he himself nor anyone who ever saw him had the remotest notion whether the ball was going to be straight or crooked. In fact, Emmett thought carefully about his bowling and he ensured he remembered the strengths and weaknesses of his opponents. One profile described him as ‘essentially a head bowler’ and suggested that, in the Personality, performance and popularity