Willis Cuttell
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| Batting style | Right-hand bat | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Bowling style | Right-arm slow | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Willis Robert Cuttell (13 September 1863 in Sheffield, Yorkshire – 9 December 1929 in Nelson, Lancashire) was an English cricketer. Along with Albert Hallam, his support for Briggs and Mold gave Lancashire its first official County championship victory in 1897. His bowling was also important to Lancashire's Championship win seven years later, in which they went through the whole season without being beaten.
Cuttell was a slow right-arm bowler who possessed the unusual ability to turn the ball from leg without throwing it up enough to encourage risk-taking batsmen to attack him. He was very accurate in length and also possessed the characteristic break-back of most bowlers of his time, which made him as unplayable as any bowler when the pitch helped him.
He was very slow to move into first-class cricket. Cuttell's early cricket was played for the Accrington Club in the Lancashire League. Having been born in Yorkshire and his father William Cuttell having played for them in the 1860s, he decided to try for a place in the Yorkshire eleven. However, his form in a couple of matches against opposition that was not recognised as first-class was not encouraging, so that Willis returned to league cricket. From 1891 he shifted to the Nelson Club (later famous as where Ted McDonald played when qualifying for Lancashire) and proved himself the best bowler in league cricket. In 1895 he took 106 wickets for 8½ runs apiece and in 1893 as many as 118 wickets fell to his bowling in league games.
Cuttell, long qualified by residence for Lancashire, was finally engaged by them for the season of 1896. He played only two games and then was dropped, but the following year, after a rather slow start, Cuttell showed himself right up to the standard of first-class county cricket. On hard pitches he was never especially difficult, but on the softer pitches at the end of the season he was frequently deadly, taking twelve for 81 in the last match against Nottinghamshire. His work on soft pitches was deadly enough for him to head the Lancashire averages for all first-class games and was chosen as Cricketer of the Year by Wisden.
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