Days of the Demon

[fredfertang]

Days of the Demon

In this feature Martin looks back to Victorian times, and tells the story of Frederick 'The Demon' Spofforth

 

[Burgey]

Fantastic stuff mate.

Another great Balmain boy.

 

[Flametree]

I assume the insane wicket tally (280 at an average of 4!) in the "odds" games on tour were due to the tourists playing regularly against "The 30 Men of Great Yarmouth" or some such. Did folk pay to play against the tourists I wonder?

Would love to see that tried again somewhere, though maybe the Brett Lee to Piers Morgan exercise showed it's not such a good idea after all...

 

[Burgey]

Only because lee is a ****.

 

[fredfertang]

I assume the insane wicket tally (280 at an average of 4!) in the "odds" games on tour were due to the tourists playing regularly against "The 30 Men of Great Yarmouth" or some such. Did folk pay to play against the tourists I wonder?

Would love to see that tried again somewhere, though maybe the Brett Lee to Piers Morgan exercise showed it's not such a good idea after all...

The highest number of opposition players seems to have been 18 - for example the Australians played 18 of Elland, who they dismissed for 29 and 66, Spofforth's figures were 6-16 and 10-37. The locals can't have been a bad side though - a dozen of them played First Class cricket, and half of them had pretty decent careers - I hadn't heard of any of them mind

Other side of the Pennines and they played 18 of Longsight - there seven of the locals played First Class cricket, though non of them more than a handful of times. They got 63 and 74, so a tad better with 8-37 and 5-34 for Spofforth - Longsight did have two distinguished guests though - Fred Grace scored 23 and 42 and his cousin WR Gilbert also got a few runs and picked up some wickets

All the against odds matches seem to have been in the north of England where professionalism was common - in the south all the matches appear to have been 11 against 11

 

[Magrat Garlick]

281 wickets at 4.10 means 1152 conceded runs. 97 wickets at 11.01 in the FC matches means 1068 runs - so the rest of the tour he must have taken 184 wickets for 84 runs, or an average of 0.45.

I reckon someone has left out the runs conceded somewhere in that calculation

 

[fredfertang]

I might do the calculation again properly later, but then I might find something better to do, but looking through all the scorecards on CA, in what are the odds matches my arithmetic tells me he took 252 wickets at 5.43 in those

However this was five part tour

Part 1 was in Australia, where Spofforth took 109 wickets at 4.70

Then it was on to NZ, 107 at 3.85

Back to Aus and 61 at 5.20 before travelling to England

The Aussies played some games in North America on the way back and he took 69 at 4.21 in those

There are also a few instances where the number of wickets he took are known but not the number of runs conceded - I think sometimes those are just added on so reducing average, but I've ignored them in the above calculations