Bill Farrimond
Encyclopedia
William Farrimond was an English
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 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 who played in four Tests
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...

 from 1931 to 1935.

Bill Farrimond was widely regarded in the late 1920s and across the 1930s as the second best wicketkeeper in English first-class cricket
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...

. The problem was that the man regarded as the best was his Lancashire
Lancashire County Cricket Club
Lancashire County Cricket Club represents the historic county of Lancashire in cricket's County Championship. The club was founded in 1864 as a successor to Manchester Cricket Club and has played at Old Trafford since then...

 colleague George Duckworth
George Duckworth
George Duckworth was a professional cricketer who played first-class cricket for Lancashire and England....

, and for many years both of them were kept out of the England 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...

 by Leslie Ames, a much better batsman. The result was that Farrimond played only a handful of county matches each season from 1925 to 1937 before, on the retirement of Duckworth, he finally played two full seasons in 1938 and 1939.

Despite being second string wicketkeeper at Lancashire, Farrimond played four Tests. In 1930-31, he was picked as second wicketkeeper to Duckworth on the tour to the South Africa
South African cricket team
The South African national cricket team represent South Africa in international cricket. They are administrated by Cricket South Africa.South Africa is a full member of the International Cricket Council, also known as ICC, with Test and One Day International, or ODI, status...

, and played in two matches when Duckworth was injured. Four years later, he toured the West Indies
West Indian cricket team
The West Indian cricket team, also known colloquially as the West Indies or the Windies, is a multi-national cricket team representing a sporting confederation of 15 mainly English-speaking Caribbean countries, British dependencies and non-British dependencies.From the mid 1970s to the early 1990s,...

 and played one Test, with regular keeper Les Ames playing just as a batsman in that match. His only home Test match was the game at Lord's in 1935 against South Africa, when Ames again played as a batsman only.

An unobtrusive wicketkeeper, unlike Duckworth, Farrimond was the second wicketkeeper, after Tiger Smith
Tiger Smith
Ernest James "Tiger" Smith was an English wicket-keeper who played in 11 Tests from 1911/1912 to 1914. In county cricket, he had a much longer career as the successor to Dick Lilley: he played for Warwickshire on a regular basis until 1930...

, to make seven dismissals in an innings, then the world record. A useful lower order batsman, his one century came playing for the Minor Counties side.

He played one first-class match in 1945, a friendly "Roses" match, but at 42 years of age he did not play again when regular cricket resumed after the Second World War.
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