Bill O'Reilly (cricketer)
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 Australia (AUS) |
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| Batting style | Left hand bat | |
| Bowling type | Right arm leg break | |
| Tests | First-class | |
| Matches | 27 | 135 |
| Runs scored | 410 | 1655 |
| Batting average | 12.81 | 13.13 |
| 100s/50s | 0/1 | 0/1 |
| Top score | 56* | 56* |
| Balls bowled | 10024 | 37064 |
| Wickets | 144 | 774 |
| Bowling average | 22.59 | 16.60 |
| 5 wickets in innings | 11 | 63 |
| 10 wickets in match | 3 | 17 |
| Best bowling | 7/54 | 9/38 |
| Catches/stumpings | 7/0 | 65/0 |
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Test debut: 29 January 1932 |
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William Joseph "Bill" O'Reilly, often known as Tiger O'Reilly, (born 20 December 1905 in White Cliffs, New South Wales, died 6 October 1992 in Sydney), was an outstanding Australian cricketer, and, in retirement, a well-respected cricket writer and broadcaster.
O'Reilly was a competent left-handed lower-order batsman and one of the best right-arm spin bowlers ever to play. He delivered the ball from a two-fingered grip at close to medium pace with great accuracy, and could produce leg breaks, googlies, and top spinners at will with no discernible change in his action[1]. A tall man at around 185 cm, he whirled his arms a lot but had a low point of delivery that meant it was very difficult for the batsman to read the flight of the ball out of his hand. Sir Donald Bradman, the greatest batsman of all time, rated O'Reilly as the finest bowler that he had ever witnessed. In 1935, Wisden wrote of him: "O'Reilly was one of the best examples in modern cricket of what could be described as a 'hostile' bowler."[2] Four years later, after a second successful tour of England, Wisden 1939 wrote: "He is emphatically one of the greatest bowlers of all time."[3]
As well as his skill, O'Reilly was also known for his competitiveness, and bowled with the aggression of a paceman. In a short biographical essay on O'Reilly for the Barclays World of Cricket book, his contemporary, the England cricketer Ian Peebles, wrote: "There is no hypocrisy in O'Reilly's attitude to his job, and any scoring-stroke was greeted by a testy demand for the immediate return of the ball rather than a congratulatory word. Full well did he deserve his sobriquet of 'Tiger'."[4]
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[edit] Youth and early career
O'Reilly was born in the opal mining town of White Cliffs, New South Wales, the son of a schoolteacher. O'Reilly's cricket skills were largely self-taught: with his family moving from town to town whenever his father was posted to a different school, he had little opportunity to attend coaching. His bowling action was far from the classic leg-spin bowler's run-up and delivery[1].
He played representative cricket as a schoolboy, including matches against Bowral and Bradman, and made his debut for New South Wales in the 1927-28 season, but only played then in three matches, taking just seven wickets[5].
[edit] First-class cricketer
He then disappeared from first-class cricket for four years to train as a schoolteacher before re-emerging in the 1931-32 season as the successor to Arthur Mailey in the New South Wales side. Within half a dozen games, he was one of several young players introduced to the Australia Test side for the fourth Test in a badly one-sided series against South Africa. Australia duly won this match at Adelaide with Clarrie Grimmett taking 14 wickets in the match, but O'Reilly supported Grimmett with four wickets and retained his place for the final match of the rubber at Melbourne. On a pitch made treacherous by rain, he did not bowl at all when South Africa were bowled out for just 36 in the first innings, and came on only towards the end of the second innings, when he took three wickets as the touring side subsided to 45 all out.[6]
In Sheffield Shield cricket in 1931-32, O'Reilly took 25 wickets at a cost of 21 runs apiece,[7] and the following year he was even more successful, taking 31 wickets at just 14 runs each.[8] New South Wales won the competition in both seasons.
[edit] Test regular
In 1932-33, O'Reilly was a regular member of the Australian Test side and he played in all five Tests in the famous Bodyline series. He was the team's leading wicket-taker with 27 wickets,[9] and his 10 wickets in the second match of the series, at Melbourne, where he opened the bowling, enabled Australia to square the rubber after England had won the first match.[10]
The leg-theory bowling used by England under Douglas Jardine brought the touring team victories in the remaining three matches: Australia were handicapped not only by the tactics, but also by a lack of fast bowling which saw O'Reilly also opening the bowling at both Adelaide and Brisbane, and by a falling-off in the performance of Grimmett. O'Reilly not only took most wickets but he also bowled by some distance the most overs on either side, and his record of less than two runs from each of his 383 eight-ball overs indicates the control he achieved.[9]
In 1933-34, with no Test series in Australia, O'Reilly finished top of the Sheffield Shield bowling averages with 33 wickets for 18.30 runs each. Against Victoria at Melbourne, he took nine wickets for 50 runs in the second innings.[11] His selection for the Ashes tour of England in 1934 was a foregone conclusion.
O'Reilly and Grimmett were the bowling stars of the 1934 series which saw Australia regain The Ashes. They began by taking 19 of the 20 England wickets to fall in a comfortable victory in the first Test at Trent Bridge. O'Reilly's match figures were 11 wickets for 129 runs, and his second innings figures of seven for 54 remained his Test best.[12] England then won the second Test at Lord's, but O'Reilly shook English confidence in the third match, at Manchester, by taking three wickets in four balls – Cyril Walters, Bob Wyatt out first ball, then Walter Hammond second ball after leg-glancing his first for four – so that a high-scoring match never looked likely to produce a result.[13] A further draw at Headingley, with England saved by rain after a Bradman triple century, set up the decider for The Oval. Grimmett proved the decisive bowler as Australia regained the Ashes with victory by 562 runs[14]: still, more than 70 years on, the second largest margin of victory in terms of runs in any Test match.
O'Reilly was the leading Australian bowler of the tour, taking 28 wickets at an average of less than 25, while Grimmett took 25 wickets at just under 27 runs apiece. The other Test bowlers took only 18 wickets between them. On the tour as a whole, O'Reilly headed the tourists' averages with 109 wickets at 17.04, which meant that he also topped the averages for the whole English cricket season[15]. In the matches against the English counties, he took 11 wickets in the games against Leicestershire and Glamorgan, and in the match against Somerset, after Hans Ebeling took the first wicket, he took the remaining nine for 38 runs, and that proved to be the best innings figures of his career.[16] He was named as one of the Wisden Cricketers of the Year in the 1935 edition of the almanack for his deeds on tour.[1]
O'Reilly played little state cricket for New South Wales in 1934-35, and none at all the following season when he was selected for the Australian tour to South Africa.
The South Africa tour was another triumph for the leg-spin attack of O'Reilly and Grimmett, but O'Reilly was slightly overshadowed by his team-mate in the Tests. With 44 wickets in the series, Grimmett set a new record for the number of wickets by an Australian in a series, and he raised his Test career total to 216 wickets, beating the then world record of 189 by Sydney Barnes. O'Reilly took 27 wickets at an average of just over 17 runs each: the other bowlers in the Australian team took 27 wickets between them. On the tour as a whole, O'Reilly came out ahead of Grimmett, with 95 wickets against Grimmett's 92, and at an average of 13.56 against 14.80. O'Reilly also revealed hitherto undiscovered batting talents, making an undefeated 56 in the fourth Test match at Johannesburg, and putting on 69 for the last wicket with Ernie McCormick. It was the only time in his first-class cricket career that he passed 50.[17]
[edit] The senior bowler
Grimmett retired from Test cricket after the South African tour, leaving O'Reilly as the hub of the Australian bowling attack for the MCC Ashes tour of 1936-37. O'Reilly responded by becoming the leading wicket-taker in the series (though Bill Voce took more wickets for England, with 26).[18] But his 25 wickets were at increased cost – 22 runs per wicket – and he took five wickets in an innings only once, in the first Test at Brisbane, which England won convincingly. The circumstances of the series determined O'Reilly's role: after England won the first two Tests, O'Reilly appears to have been given the job not just of bowling the opposition out, but also of containing them, and he was criticised in the 1938 Wisden for defensive bowling. Wisden even went as far as to describe it as "leg theory", though the resemblance with the tactics used in Bodyline is likely to have been restricted to accuracy and hostility, O'Reilly being nowhere close to Harold Larwood for pace.[19] If the intention was to stifle Hammond in particular, then it appears to have worked, but O'Reilly's figures for the series suggest he was consistent but not always penetrative. Morris Sievers, from fewer matches, outperformed him by average; Leslie Fleetwood-Smith, a slow left-arm spinner, got more eye-catching individual figures, including 10 wickets in the victory at Adelaide. Whatever the methods, they were successful: having lost the first two Tests, Australia proceeded to win the final three to retain the Ashes they had won in 1934 in England, and O'Reilly's five for 51 and three for 58 were the best figures in the decisive fifth Test at Melbourne.[20]
In 1937-38, O'Reilly returned to more regular state cricket and New South Wales duly won the Sheffield Shield for the first time in five seasons. He took 33 wickets at an average of just over 14 runs each, and against South Australia at Adelaide he repeated his Somerset feat of 1934, taking the last nine wickets of the first innings at a cost of 41 runs; this time, he followed up with five for 57 in the second innings.[21]
O'Reilly's second and final Ashes tour to England as a player in 1938 again saw him as the most effective bowler in the team. His final record of 22 wickets at an average of 27 in the four Tests – one Test was rained off in its entirety – was marginally less than 1934, and in all matches he took 104 wickets at 16.59. In its report of the tour, however, Wisden's 1939 edition noted that "it was nothing short of remarkable that despite the moderate support accorded to him he bowled so consistently well and so effectively."[3] Again, O'Reilly was often used defensively where there was no help from the wicket, but, Wisden added, "when... the wicket gave him the least encouragement he robbed the greatest batsmen of initiative, and was most destructive".[3]
In a mainly high-scoring series, O'Reilly's greatest triumph was in the low-scoring fourth Test at Leeds, where he exploited a difficult pitch to take five wickets in each innings as Australia secured the victory that enabled them to retain the Ashes. His match figures were 10 for 122.[22] Almost as important was his score of 42 in the Lord's Test that enabled Australia to save the match: having been dropped by Eddie Paynter, he hit Hedley Verity for consecutive sixes to take Australia past the follow-on mark.[23] On the debit side, his figures at The Oval, where England posted the then-record Test score of 903 for seven wickets were three for 178 off 85 overs, though these compared favourably with Fleetwood-Smith's one for 298 off just two overs more.[24]
O'Reilly rested from Sheffield Shield cricket in 1938-39, but resumed playing fairly regularly for New South Wales in the next two seasons before competitive cricket was suspended in Australia for the Second World War. First-class cricket resumed in Australia in 1945-46, though the Shield competition was not held that season. O'Reilly captained New South Wales, though the emergence of Ray Lindwall and Ernie Toshack in the state side indicated a shift in emphasis away from spin and towards faster bowling.
O'Reilly's final first-class cricket came on a four-match tour by an Australian team to New Zealand, during which a four-day match – in fact it was all over inside two days – against a representative New Zealand side was played, later to be designated as the first Test between the two countries. New Zealand were outclassed, making 42 in their first innings and 54 in their second to lose by an innings and 103 runs. O'Reilly took five wickets for 14 runs in the first innings, and three for 19 in the second. It was his last Test and his last first-class game.[25]
[edit] Career record
In his 18-season first-class career, O'Reilly took 774 wickets at an average of 16.60. In his 27 Test matches, O'Reilly took 144 wickets at 22.59, 102 of them in his 19 Ashes Tests against England.
[edit] After cricket
On retirement as a player, O'Reilly became a cricket columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald, remaining in that position until his health declined in 1988. Even after that, he continued to take part in radio and TV broadcasts until his death at the age of 87 in 1992.
In 1996 he was posthumously inducted into the Australian Cricket Hall of Fame as one of the ten inaugural members.
[edit] References
- Wisden Cricketers' Almanack, in its editions from 1929 to 1947, contains reports on all Test matches played by O'Reilly. Wisden 1935 and 1939 have longer reports on O'Reilly's two tours to England; the 1935 edition also names him as a Wisden Cricketer of the Year and accords him a detailed profile that includes a description of his action.
- CricketArchive contains full statistical and match details of all games played by O'Reilly.
- Barclays World Of Cricket, 1986 edition, contains a brief profile of O'Reilly by Ian Peebles quoted in this article.
[edit] Notes
- ^ a b c Wisden 1935 edition, "Five Cricketers of the Year", Part I, pages 284-286
- ^ Wisden 1935 edition, "The Australians in England", Part II, page 5
- ^ a b c Wisden 1939 edition, "Australians in England in 1938", page 197
- ^ Barclays World of Cricket 1986 edition, "William Joseph O'Reilly" by Ian Peebles, pages 218-219
- ^ http://www.cricketarchive.co.uk/Archive/Players/0/584/584.html
- ^ Wisden 1933 edition, "South Africans in Australia and New Zealand", Part II, pages 661-665
- ^ Wisden 1933 edition, "Cricket in Australia", Part II, page 675
- ^ Wisden 1934 edition, "Cricket in Australia", Part II, page 675
- ^ a b Wisden 1934 edition, "MCC Team in Australasia", Part II, page 670
- ^ Wisden 1934 edition, "MCC Team in Australasia", Part II, pages 649-650
- ^ Wisden 1935 edition, "Cricket in Australia", Part II, pages 666-681
- ^ Wisden 1935 edition, "The Australians in England", Part II, page 23-25
- ^ Wisden 1935 edition, "The Australians in England", Part II, page 33-35
- ^ Wisden 1935 edition, "The Australians in England", Part II, page 48-51
- ^ Wisden 1935 edition, "The Australians in England", Part II, page 58-61
- ^ Wisden 1935 edition, "The Australians in England", Part II, pages 14, 30 and 44
- ^ Wisden 1937 edition, "Australian Team In South Africa", Part II, page 647-669
- ^ Wisden 1938 edition, "MCC Team in Australia", pages 775-816
- ^ Wisden 1938 edition, "MCC Team in Australia", page 780
- ^ Wisden 1938 edition, "MCC Team in Australia", pages 810-811
- ^ Wisden 1939 edition, "Cricket in Australia", pages 796-813
- ^ Wisden 1939 edition, "Australians in England in 1938", pages 232-234
- ^ Wisden 1939 edition, "Australians in England in 1938", pages 224-226
- ^ Wisden 1939 edition, "Australians in England in 1938", pages 243-246
- ^ Wisden 1947 edition, "Australian team in New Zealand", page 629
