Bill O’Reilly was an Australian cricketer of imperishable memory. In the 1930s he stood clear above all of his type. His fame rests on his appearance in only twenty-seven Test matches, for he was twenty-six before he won his first cap and his skills were at their height when War came. He played one Test in New Zealand afterwards, but decided that at the age of forty his legs could scarcely sustain his large, lumbering frame on hard Australian pitches and retired to the press box. O’Reilly’s pungent opinions enlivened the sports pages of the Sydney Morning Herald for more than forty years. To describe his critical style as trenchant would be an understatement. When Kerry Packer attempted his takeover of world cricket in 1977 he found an implacable opponent in his fellow Sydney-sider. One-day cricket as played Down Under, with the coloured clothing and all the commercial ballyhoo attending it, was anathema to O’Reilly. While some temporised, he saw that the primary object of the true game, to bowl out the other side, was being perverted into that of stopping them scoring.
Bill O’Reilly’s name is inevitably closely linked with that of Sir Donald Bradman since before they came together into the state team they had been antagonists playing as country boys for their townships. When O’Reilly, a twenty-year-old at a teacher-training college, first played for Wingello at Bowral in 1926, Bradman, three years his junior and already the local prodigy, scored 234 not out. O’Reilly could only console himself that he had had the boy wonder missed at slip and that he had bowled him first ball when the game was continued the following weekend. From this cricket they both graduated in the Australian manner via Sydney clubs to the New South Wales XI.
Though O’Reilly was already a prolific wicket-taker his advance was much the slower, probably because the highly individual plunging action, front-on and knees bent, did not commend itself to the purists. Ian Peebles called it ‘a glorious rampage of flailing arms and legs’, from which emerged at a full slow-medium pace, and sometimes faster, every ball in a wrist-spinner’s armoury, delivered with a rare degree of accuracy and an unusually high bounce. It was delivered, too, with a malignity of facial expression which inspired the nickname of ‘the Tiger’. The genial side of his nature was well to the fore off the field. But on it he was a figure of rare hostility.
O’Reilly was effective on any surface, for he seemed able always to induce those extra inches of bounce which made for such a rigorous examination in judgment of length and footwork. Even on the super-placid Oval pitch of 1938 on which Hutton made his record 364 and England declared at 903 for seven, he bowled eighty-five overs, conceding just two runs an over for three of the best wickets. His comments on that pitch remain splendidly lurid. On another pitch of consummate ease at Old Trafford in 1934 he had the wickets of Walters, Wyatt and Hammond in four balls, the last two clean bowled, and finished with seven for 189 out of a total of 627 for nine. When O’Reilly found a responsive English pitch – as at Trent Bridge in 1934 and Headingley in 1938 – he was too much even for the best. In the Headingley match his ten for 122 combined with Bradman’s third successive Test hundred on the ground to seal Australia’s grip on the Ashes.
William Joseph O’Reilly: b White Cliffs, New South Wales, 20 December 1905; d 6 October 1992