adharcric said:
Well he's one of the few bowlers ever to average 6+ wickets a game, along with Barnes, Muralitharan and maybe a few others. Was he not that great?
As for Barnes, why is he considered so great? Just asking out of curiosity - I'm rather ignorant on cricket legends from the early times.
Well, Barnes played in a later era, and was genuinely considered head and shoulders above the other bowlers of his time. I think Barnes is a little overrated though, his record is merely very good rather than unbelievable if you take out the 83 wickets @ 9.86 he took against South Africa. His worst ever match haul against South Africa was 8 wickets, and he averaged almost 12 per match against them, including 17 in one test.
Against Australia he took a bit over 5 wickets per match at an average of 21.58, which obviously isn't as amazing. One key element in his reptuation though is that Barnes consistently had the best of great batsmen like Trumper, Hill and Macartney. Indeed, I think his 13 dismissals of Trumper was a record for a fair while in terms of a bowler dismissing a particular batsman goes.
Lohmann on the other hand didn't have any success against any particularly renowned batsmen, mainly because Australia simply didn't have any legendary batsmen (by today's standards) at that time, and his record isn't all that incredible compared to his contemporaries. Look at the bowlers he bowled with in the late 1880s for instance. John Briggs took 118 wickets @ 17.75, Bill Barnes took 51 wickets @ 15.55, Bill Bates took 50 wickets @ 16.42, Bob Peel took 101 wickets @ 16.98, and even the less successful bowlers averaged 20 odd.
In Barnes' era, though bowling averages were still very low, the only notable bowler I know of that he ever bowled with that had a teens average was Colin Blythe, and a lot of the bowlers that Barnes played with averaged in the high 20s or low 30s if they weren't particularly good, unlike 15-20 years earlier. While the average of 21 against Australia isn't particularly incredible, his overall record certainly is, and he also held the overall test wicket taking record for over 20 years. There's other reasons why he is famous too, which are about his reputation and his innovations in bowling and ability to bowl a remarkable range of styles. Lohmann was certainly recognised as very good, but I don't think his reputation really compares to Barnes'.
