neville cardus
International Debutant
It is unlikely that even a game so renowned for its characters as cricket has ever known one quite like Tom Emmett. There was never a situation for which he did not have a funny remark and scarcely a day that he did not live to the fullest. From career's beginning to career's end, he put every beat of his genial heart into the game, and the game was all the fuller for it.
Although of unnaturally erubescent aspect, Emmett had about him that venerable nature which comes more from moral fibre than mere D.N.A.. He was as great as he was great-hearted, a man with clownish tendencies but never merely a clown; he was a cricketer first and foremost, and a very fine one at that. He captained his beloved Yorkshire from 1878 to 1882 and numbered amongst the finest bowlers in England from 1866 to his retirement decades later. A left-arm quickie of destructive malice, a batsman in much the same vein and a fielder as enthusiastic (if not as skilled) as Jonty Rhodes, he served both county and country with distinction. There was but one allround cricketer whose claims were greater than his, and that was W.G. Grace.
Emmett and Grace, it has often been said, presided over their epoch's cricketing realm just as Gladstone and Disraeli, at the same time, lorded over the House of Commons. As the statesmen faced up from across the dispatch boxes, so the cricketers did, too, from across the wicket. Their encounters are the stuff of legend and will doubtless be recalled with as much affection centuries from now as they were when their protagonists still walked the Earth. I'll recount a few myself over the next few days.
Although of unnaturally erubescent aspect, Emmett had about him that venerable nature which comes more from moral fibre than mere D.N.A.. He was as great as he was great-hearted, a man with clownish tendencies but never merely a clown; he was a cricketer first and foremost, and a very fine one at that. He captained his beloved Yorkshire from 1878 to 1882 and numbered amongst the finest bowlers in England from 1866 to his retirement decades later. A left-arm quickie of destructive malice, a batsman in much the same vein and a fielder as enthusiastic (if not as skilled) as Jonty Rhodes, he served both county and country with distinction. There was but one allround cricketer whose claims were greater than his, and that was W.G. Grace.
Emmett and Grace, it has often been said, presided over their epoch's cricketing realm just as Gladstone and Disraeli, at the same time, lorded over the House of Commons. As the statesmen faced up from across the dispatch boxes, so the cricketers did, too, from across the wicket. Their encounters are the stuff of legend and will doubtless be recalled with as much affection centuries from now as they were when their protagonists still walked the Earth. I'll recount a few myself over the next few days.
Last edited: