Alfred Shaw
Encyclopedia
Alfred Shaw was an eminent Victorian cricket
Cricket
Cricket is a bat-and-ball game played between two teams of 11 players on an oval-shaped field, at the centre of which is a rectangular 22-yard long pitch. One team bats, trying to score as many runs as possible while the other team bowls and fields, trying to dismiss the batsmen and thus limit the...

er and rugby footballer, who bowled the first ball in Test cricket
Test cricket
Test cricket is the longest form of the sport of cricket. Test matches are played between national representative teams with "Test status", as determined by the International Cricket Council , with four innings played between two teams of 11 players over a period of up to a maximum five days...

 and was the first to take five wickets in a Test innings (5/35). He who organised the first British Isles rugby tour to Australasia in 1888
1888 British Lions tour to New Zealand and Australia
The 1888 British Isles tour to New Zealand and Australia was a series of rugby union games played by an unofficial British team against invitational teams in New Zealand and Australia...

. He made two trips to North America and four to Australia, captaining
English national cricket captains
This is a list of all English national cricket captains, comprising all of the men, boys and women who have captained an English national cricket team at official international level. England played in the first Test match in 1877 and have played more Test matches, and had more captains, than any...

 the English cricket team
English cricket team
The England and Wales cricket team is a cricket team which represents England and Wales. Until 1992 it also represented Scotland. Since 1 January 1997 it has been governed by the England and Wales Cricket Board , having been previously governed by Marylebone Cricket Club from 1903 until the end...

 in four Test match
Test cricket
Test cricket is the longest form of the sport of cricket. Test matches are played between national representative teams with "Test status", as determined by the International Cricket Council , with four innings played between two teams of 11 players over a period of up to a maximum five days...

es on the all-professional tour of Australia in 1881/82, where his side lost and drew two each. He was also, along with James Lillywhite
James Lillywhite
James Lillywhite was a first-class and Test cricketer and umpire. He was the first ever captain of the English cricket team in a Test match, captaining 2 Tests against Australia in 1876-77, losing the first, but winning the second.Lillywhite was born in Westhampnett in Sussex, the son of a...

 and Arthur Shrewsbury
Arthur Shrewsbury
Arthur Shrewsbury was an English cricketer, and rugby football administrator, who organised the first British Isles rugby tour to Australasia in 1888, and who was widely rated as competing with W. G...

, co-promoter of the tour.

Career

Shaw was one of the few cricketers of his time whose Christian name was used more frequently than his initials. Standing only 5'6½" tall, he put on copious weight near the end of his career, when his naturally corpulent build was dramatically accentuated. It is unfortunate, therefore, that most photographs of him were taken so late in his cricketing life. A man of droopy aspect, bushed eyes, some classically Victorian facial hair and a belt nearer his breast than his substantial waist, he certainly didn't look the part of the era's finest medium-pacer, but they were few who qustioned his credentials.

Shaw's first-class
First-class cricket
First-class cricket is a class of cricket that consists of matches of three or more days' scheduled duration, that are between two sides of eleven players and are officially adjudged first-class by virtue of the standard of the competing teams...

 career extended from 1864 to 1897, and most of his matches were for Nottinghamshire
Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club
Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club is one of the 18 major county clubs which make up the English and Welsh domestic cricket structure, representing the historic county of Nottinghamshire, and the current county champions. Its limited overs team is called the Nottinghamshire Outlaws...

. He had the unusual distinction for a professional of frequently captaining that county, and this was vindicated when he took Notts to four successive Championships from 1883 to 1886. He was a natural leader with a power persona, but his connection with Notts all but ended after that last triumph. As his team-mates observed, the county went into rapid decline upon his leaving.

A fervent champion of the professional cricketer's rights, Shaw did a lot of work in support of his ilk. He declined to tour with WG Grace in 1873/74 because the pros were to be afforded only second-class facilities. In 1881, he led a strike of Notts professionals, demanding a formal contract of employment to guarantee an automatic benefit at the end of an agreed playing period. The high-handed Nottinghamshire committee thought this absolute anarchy and, apparently justified in its feeling that an amateur skipper was the way to go, dropped every member of the offending faction from the side. There was eventually a reconciliation, however, and Shaw took on the capaincy once more.

He was a remarkably accurate bowler, sending down more overs than he conceded runs in his entire career. Of course, a maiden over was far more easily bowled then than it is now, as it comprised only four deliveries, but Shaw's unparalleled consistency in this regard scarcely dropped off when the five-ball over was launched in 1889. Nearly two thirds of all the overs that he bowled were runless.

Although he might by today's terms be called a seamer, back then Shaw was fundamentally a length bowler, holding a line on or just outside the off-stump: certainly, he often employed the off-theory, with as many as eight fielders patrolling the offside. His run-up was made up of six rapid, economical steps, but, according to the man himself, "I really used to bowl faster than people thought I did, and I could make the ball break both ways, but not much. In my opinion, length and variation of pace constitute the secret of successful bowling." However, although he was regarded almost universally as "the high priest of length", he and Ted Peate
Ted Peate
Edmund Peate was an English professional cricketer who played for Yorkshire and England.-Overview:...

 together poured scorn all over suggestions that they were capable of "hitting the spot" with nearly every delivery (as was the common perception).

Shaw's first-class bowling average is, by a quite substantial margin, the lowest of any bowler to have taken 2,000 or more wickets, but must be remembered that the pitches of the nineteenth century (particularly those at the start of his career) were far more bowler-friendly than they later became and are today. Still, this did not stop cricket's most reputed potentate, WG Grace, from asserting that, between 1870 and 1880, Shaw was "perhaps the best bowler in England". Certainly, he was supreme among slow bowlers.

It has occasionally been put forward that, were Shaw to feature in modern-day limited-overs cricket, he would come in for a fair amount of punishment—as all bowlers sometimes do. It is just possible that the batsmen of the 1860s and 1970s allowed him to settle as easily as he did onto that dogged length of his when they might just as easily have tried to knock him off it. Grace aside, it was not until the advent of such cavalier batters as the Surrey duo Walter Read
Walter Read
Walter William Read was an English cricketer, who was a fluent right hand bat. An occasional bowler of lobs, he sometimes switched to quick overarm deliveries. He captained England in two Test matches, winning them both...

 and KJ Key (together with—and in no small part because of—superior pitches), that the pull-stroke, played across the line of a ball outside the off-stump, came to be properly employed. It had generally seen as unethical to swing an offside delivery away to leg, and Shaw, with his vacant legside, often had to change his tactics.

For many years, he was on the MCC groundstaff. In 1874, he took all ten wicket
Wicket
In the sport of cricket the word wicket has several distinct meanings:-Definitions of wicket:Most of the time, the wicket is one of the two sets of three stumps and two bails at either end of the pitch...

s for the club in a first-class
First-class cricket
First-class cricket is a class of cricket that consists of matches of three or more days' scheduled duration, that are between two sides of eleven players and are officially adjudged first-class by virtue of the standard of the competing teams...

 innings
Innings
An inning, or innings, is a fixed-length segment of a game in any of a variety of sports – most notably cricket and baseball during which one team attempts to score while the other team attempts to prevent the first from scoring. In cricket, the term innings is both singular and plural and is...

. In 1875 (against the MCC this time), he returned bowling figures
Bowling analysis
In the sport of cricket, a bowling analysis usually refers to a notation summarising a bowler's performance in terms of overs bowled, how many of those overs are maidens , total runs conceded and number of wickets taken...

 of seven for seven off 41.2 overs
Over (cricket)
In the sport of cricket, an over is a set of six consecutive balls bowled in succession. An over is normally bowled by a single bowler. However, in the event of injury preventing a bowler from completing an over, it is completed by a teammate....

;36 of them maidens, the equivalent of almost 1,800 modern-day overs) remained a record until Tich Freeman
Tich Freeman
Alfred Percy "Tich" Freeman was an English cricketer. A leg spin bowler for Kent and England, he is the only man to take 300 wickets in an English season, and is the second most prolific wicket taker in first class cricket history.-Career:Freeman's common name comes from his extremely short...

 beat it over fifty years later.

At the end of that 1876 season, Shaw went Down Under with James Lillywhite Junior's side. He is famous for having bowled the first-ever delivery in Test Match cricket (a dot, of course) to Charles Bannerman
Charles Bannerman
Charles Bannerman was an Australian Test cricketer, a right-hand batsman, who played domestic cricket for New South Wales....

, who went on to score 165. As a batsman, he became the first Test cricketer to be stumped; by Jack Blackham
Jack Blackham
John McCarthy Blackham was a Test cricketer who played for Victoria and Australia.A specialist wicket-keeper, Blackham played in the first Test match at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in March 1877 and the famous Ashes Test match of 1882...

 off the bowling of Tom Kendall
Tom Kendall
Thomas Kingston Kendall was an Australian cricketer, who played in two Tests in 1877, including the inaugural Test which was played at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in March 1877....

. Shaw played in seven of the first eight Test Matches, missing out in 1882 because, according to a 1902 interview with Allan Steel, "he was not bowling quite at his best". Some, though, felt that his presence in the side that year might have turned the tide England's way and ruled out the spawning of The Ashes
The Ashes
The Ashes is a Test cricket series played between England and Australia. It is one of the most celebrated rivalries in international cricket and dates back to 1882. It is currently played biennially, alternately in the United Kingdom and Australia. Cricket being a summer sport, and the venues...

. As it was, he never played another Test Match and thus finished his career at the highest level with twelve wickets at an uncharacteristically large average of 23.75.

Shaw helped fellow cricketers Andrew Stoddart
Andrew Stoddart
Andrew Ernest Stoddart was an English cricketer and rugby union player. He was a Wisden Cricketer of the Year in 1893.-Cricket career:...

 and Arthur Shrewsbury to organise what became recognised as the first British Lions
British and Irish Lions
The British and Irish Lions is a rugby union team made up of players from England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales...

 rugby union
Rugby union
Rugby union, often simply referred to as rugby, is a full contact team sport which originated in England in the early 19th century. One of the two codes of rugby football, it is based on running with the ball in hand...

 tour of Australia and New Zealand
1888 British Lions tour to New Zealand and Australia
The 1888 British Isles tour to New Zealand and Australia was a series of rugby union games played by an unofficial British team against invitational teams in New Zealand and Australia...

 1888/89. The team played 55 matches, winning 27 of 35 rugby union games and 6 out of 18 matches played under Australian rules.

After Shaw's first retirement, he became a renowned umpire
Umpire (cricket)
In cricket, an umpire is a person who has the authority to make judgements on the cricket field, according to the Laws of Cricket...

, but perhaps his greatest playing achievements were still ahead of him. Along with his cricketing engagements under cricket-mad Arthur Stanley, 5th Baron Sheffield, he was employed to coach young Sussex cricketers, working part-time as a cricket coach at Ardingly College
Ardingly College
Ardingly College is a selective independent co-educational boarding and day school, founded in 1858 by Canon Nathaniel Woodard, included in the Tatler list of top public schools. The college is located in the village of Ardingly near Haywards Heath, West Sussex, England, having moved to its present...

. It didn't go unnoticed that Shaw was still far better than most of the county's regular bowlers, thus, at the age of 52, Shaw returned to county cricket.

In 1894, he bowled 422 overs for his new county, conceding just 516 runs and capturing 41 wickets. The following year, at Trent Bridge (when it was so cold that KS Ranjitsinhji kept his hands in his pockets and fielded the ball with his feet), Shaw bowled 100.1 five-ball overs as his former team accrued a gargantuan 726. He finally retired again two matches later, when Sussex drew against Middlesex, and only ever returned to the first-class scene in 1897 to play the Gentlemen of Philadelphia. He subsequently became a publican and died aged 64.

See also

  • History of Test cricket (to 1883)
    History of Test cricket (to 1883)
    Test matches in the period 1877 to 1883 were organised somewhat differently from international cricket matches today. The teams were rarely representative, and the boat trip between Australia and England, which usually lasted about 48 days, was one that many cricketers were unable or unwilling to...

  • History of Test cricket (1884 to 1889)
    History of Test cricket (1884 to 1889)
    The history of Test cricket between 1884 and 1889 was one of English dominance over the Australians. England won every Test series that was played. The period also saw the first use of the word "Test" to describe a form of cricket when the Press used it in 1885...

  • History of Test cricket (1890 to 1900)
    History of Test cricket (1890 to 1900)
    Test matches in the 19th century were somewhat different affairs than what they are today. Many of them were not designated as Test matches for many years afterwards, and it is possible that some Test players never knew they had played in a Test. Before 1888 there had been 26 Test matches, all...


External links

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