George Wootton
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| Born |
16 October 1834 Clifton, Nottinghamshire, England |
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| Died | 15 June 1924 (aged 89) Ruddington, Nottinghamshire, England |
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| Batting style | Left-handed batsman | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Bowling style | Round arm left arm fast-medium | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Source: CricketArchive
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George Wootton (1834–1924) was an English cricketer.
Born 16 October 1834, Clifton, Nottinghamshire, England; Wootton joined the All England Eleven in 1860 but did not play his first first-class match until the following season, when with five for 25 against Surrey at Trent Bridge, he established himself as a member of the county side and was to remain a regular for a decade.
However, it was when Wootton joined the ground staff at Lord's the following season that he became famous. A round-arm fast-medium left hand bowler, who skilfully varied his speed off a run of merely two paces, Wootton was exactly suited to the rough Lord's wickets of the 1860s. On these wickets, where no heavy roller was ever used and the grass was cut by a scythe that left rough tufts on the surface, there were typically stones formed from the drying of the clayey soils and balls which hit these stones could either become dead shooters or fly right over a batsman's and wicket-keeper's head. Wootton's low delivery allowed him to bowl, according to contemporaries, even more shooters than such terrifying bowlers as Jackson, Tarrant and George Freeman. It was normal for batsmen facing Wootton at Lord's to receive two shooters in each four-ball over and in tandem with veteran Jimmy Grundy, Wootton was almost unplayable.
In his first Lord's game for the MCC Wootton took fourteen for 46 and bowling eight men in his first innings and on the strength of this performance he played one game in the Canterbury Week for "England" against Kent. The following year Wootton took eighty-seven wickets for 9.74 and again was deadly against Sussex, but it was already noted that Wootton was not a formidable bowler on other southern grounds where the light roller then in use was adequate for true bounce. At Hove, Wootton did achieve the unusual feat of adding 106 for the tenth wicket with Ralph Forster – almost the first time a century was added for the last wicket in a first-class match.
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