broken I have known him time after time slacken his great pace for fear of injuring an opposing batsman. Always, and rightly too, one of the most popular players that ever stepped on to a cricket-field, still to-day, when perhaps his prime is past, there is no figure more welcome to the thousands that throng our grounds than the figure of "Long Tom," as the crowds delight to call him. It was indeed a gustable tit-bit to watch him in 1894 bowl Essex out at the Oval, taking the whole ten wickets himself.
A noteworthy fact in connection with Richardson, in the four years when he aggregated over 1000 wickets, was the great success he met with on all sorts and conditions of wickets. He could be quite as deadly in the slime or on a drying wicket as on the fieriest piece of asphalt. Now this ubiquitous wickettaking is given to practically no fast bowler that I have ever seen, with the exception of Spofix)rth, and he did it not by bowling his usual great pace, as was the case with Richardson, but by slowing himself down to the speed of a Haigh or a Jack Hearne.
It is the general opinion of many of our greatest cricketers—W. G. Grace and Ranjitsinhji, for example—that on a fast good wicket, and when bowling at the top of his form, we have never known the equal of Lockwood. Bowling with a long bouncing run, he can make the ball flick higher and faster from the pitch than any other bowler in this our third class. There is at times the very devil in it, and when the ball is not rapping incontinently at your fingers, it is hitting the middle and leg from well outside the off
