John McMahon (cricketer)

John William Joseph McMahon (28 December 1917 – 8 May 2001) was an Australian-born first-class cricketer who played for Surrey and Somerset in England from 1947 to 1957.

McMahon was an orthodox left-arm spin bowler with much variation in speed and flight who was spotted by Surrey playing in club cricket in North London and brought on to the county's staff for the 1947 season at the age of 29. In the first innings of his first match, against Lancashire at The Oval, he took five wickets for 81 runs.

In his first full season, 1948, he was Surrey's leading wicket-taker and in the last home game of the season he was awarded his county cap – he celebrated by taking eight Northamptonshire wickets for 46 runs at The Oval, six of them coming in the space of 6.3 overs for seven runs. This would remain the best bowling performance of his first-class career, not surpassed, but he did equal it seven years later. In the following game, the last away match of the season, he took 10 Hampshire wickets for 150 runs in the match at Bournemouth. In the 1948 season as a whole, he took 91 wickets at an average of 28.07. As a tail-end left-handed batsman, he managed just 93 runs in the season at an average of 4.22.

The emergence of Tony Lock as a slow left-arm bowler in 1949 brought a stuttering end of McMahon's Surrey career. Though he played in 12 first-class matches in the 1949 season, McMahon took only 19 wickets; a similar number of matches in 1950 brought 34 wickets. In 1951, he played just seven times and in 1952 only three times. In 1953, Lock split the first finger of his left hand, and played in only 11 of Surrey's County Championship matches; McMahon played as his deputy in 14 Championship matches, though a measure of their comparative merits was that Lock's 11 games produced 67 wickets at 12.38 runs apiece, while McMahon's 14 games brought him 45 wickets at the, for him, low average of 21.53. At the end of the 1953 season, McMahon was allowed to leave Surrey to join Somerset, then languishing at the foot of the County Championship and recruiting widely from other counties and other countries.