Bill O’Reilly (cricketer)

William Joseph O’Reilly was an Australian cricketer, rated as one of the greatest bowlers in the history of the game. Sir Donald Bradman said that he was the greatest bowler he had ever faced or watched. He delivered the ball from a two-fingered grip at close to medium pace with great accuracy. He was awarded the Wisden Cricketer of the Year in 1935.

About Bill O’Reilly (cricketer) in brief

William Joseph O’Reilly was an Australian cricketer, rated as one of the greatest bowlers in the history of the game. Sir Donald Bradman said that he was the greatest bowler he had ever faced or watched. He delivered the ball from a two-fingered grip at close to medium pace with great accuracy. He whirled his arms to an unusual extent and 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. He learned to bowl because his older brothers dominated the batting rights. His cricket skills were largely self-taught; his family moved from town to town whenever his father was posted to a different school, so he had little opportunity to attend coaching. He was awarded the Wisden Cricketer of the Year in 1935. He died in a car crash on his way home from a match in Sydney in 1988. He is buried in a suburb of Sydney called White Cliffs, New South Wales. O’ Reilly was the fourth child in the family, with two elder brothers and a sister. His father, Ernest, was a school teacher and moved around the areas surrounding the Murray River to study and teach. He had been appointed to open the first school in the town, and had helped to build the school and its furniture himself. In January 1908, shortly after Bill had turned two, the family moved to Murringo, after Ernest was appointed the headmaster. During this time, his mother gave birth to another son and two more daughters.

In 1917, at the age of 12, theFamily moved to the town of Wingello, where there were no high schools, and there was no high school. Nevertheless, there was a local public school where his elder brother Tom had been awarded a high school prize for his sportsmanship. He said in his autobiography that the move played no vital part in his cricket education. The family later moved to another town, Goulburn, where his older brother Tom was awarded a public high school award for his sporting achievements. He later described the period as the happiest of his life, and described the desolate area as more vegetation than tennis area. In 1939, Wisden reflected on Bill O’Reilly’s successful 1938 Ashes tour of England: ‘He is emphaticallyone of the great bowlers of all time.’ O‘Reilly was also known for his competitiveness, and bowled with the aggression of a paceman. He could hit tremendously hard and was always a menace to tired bowlers.‘Full well did he deserve his sobriquet of ‘Tiger’’, wrote Ian Peebles, in a short biographical essay on O”Reilly for the Barclays World of Cricket book, his contemporary, the England cricketers Ian Péebles, wrote that ‘he was asked to make up the numbers in a Sydney junior match and, with a method that at first made everyone giggle, whipped out the opposition’.

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