Lives in Cricket No 51 - Rev ES Carter

First-class matches 82 Sims], Dury and Law in their best days’. That letter did not get Carter a reprieve. Yet there was a final twist both in teams for whom Carter played the first-class game, and then in how he would be remembered for which the reader must move to the next chapter. 16: I Zingari versus Yorkshire at Scarborough September 1882 The final twist was that Edmund Carter in this, his last first-class game, at the age of 37, played for I Zingari and played against his own much loved county. Yorkshire put out a side packed with sturdy professionals – Ulyett, Bates, Lockwood, Louis Hall, Tom Emmett, Edmund Peate – and scored 407. Carter had not before played a first-class game in which his opponents had scored over 400, and precious few when they had scored over 300. He took one wicket – that of his friend Martin Riley – but as Wisden records in capital letters “NO ANALYSIS OF THE I ZINGARI BOWLING WAS KEPT!” There is a brief mention of Carter’s bowling in the Sheffield Independent whose reporter stated that on ‘the telegraph indicating 230 [for Yorkshire] Mr Carter went on with lobs these being different to the style he adopted when previously on viz fast round.’ Descriptive accounts of Carter’s style of bowling are hard to find but seemingly he still initially tried the fast style of his younger days. Lord Harris was in the I Zingari side. IZ were bowled out for 126, with Carter caught Ulyett bowled Peate for four, and, following on, bowled out again for 190 with Carter leaving the Festival and a modest first-class career on five not out. I Zingari would come back to Scarborough eight more times, and no doubt Carter was there to greet them, but never again as a player. Surprisingly Carter was not an I Zingari member at the time he played in this game. This is speculative, but perhaps the I Zingari side arrived at Scarborough a man short, or a player may have fallen ill before the start of the game. Carter might have arrived at the ground intending to be a spectator and found himself pressed into service by Lord Harris the probable captain of IZ. In any