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.
Read more about this topic: Jack Blackham
Famous quotes containing the words cricket and/or career:
“All cries are thin and terse;
The field has droned the summer’s final mass;
A cricket like a dwindled hearse
Crawls from the dry grass.”
—Richard Wilbur (b. 1921)
“From a hasty glance through the various tests I figure it out that I would be classified in Group B, indicating “Low Average Ability,” reserved usually for those just learning to speak the English Language and preparing for a career of holding a spike while another man hits it.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)