Cricket Career
Blackham was included in the first eleven of the Carlton Cricket Club as a batsman at the age of sixteen. He first appeared for the Victorian team in 1874, and remained an automatic selection as the team's wicket-keeper for over twenty years. He was a member of the first eight Australian cricket teams to visit England.
He was one of the first wicket-keepers to stand up close to the stumps, even to the fastest bowlers, wearing gloves that Jack Pollard describes as "little more than gardening gloves". He eliminated the need for a long-stop, and Pollard says that "... in England on one of his trips there a group of clergymen complained that he was a danger to the wellbeing of cricket, encouraging as he did the abolition of long-stop, the clergy's traditional fielding spot in village teams."
Blackham was selected for the very first Test match, held at Melbourne in March 1876/77. Australia's leading bowler Fred Spofforth refused to play in the match, because Blackham was preferred to Spofforth's New South Wales team-mate Billy Murdoch. In the Test match, Blackham took three catches and made the first Test-Match stumping, when he dismissed Alfred Shaw off the bowling of Tom Kendall in England's second innings. In 1878, he represented his country for the first time overseas, as a member of the inaugural Australian cricket team to tour England and North America.
Described by team-mates as the "prince of wicket-keepers" and one of Australia's first cricketing heroes, "Black Jack" Blackham (nicknamed for his dark beard) was Australia's regular wicket-keeper from 1877 to 1894.
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