William Joseph O'Reilly (20 December 1905 – 6 October 1992) was an Australian cricketer, rated as one of the greatest bowlers in the history of the game. Following his retirement from playing, he became a well-respected cricket writer and broadcaster.
O'Reilly was one of the best spin bowlers ever to play cricket. He delivered the ball from a two-fingered grip at close to medium pace with great accuracy, and could produce leg breaks, googlies, and top spinners, with no discernible change in his action. A tall man for a spinner (around 188 cm, 6 ft 2 in), he whirled his arms to an unusual extent and had a low point of delivery that meant it was very difficult for the batsman to read the flight of the ball out of his hand. When O'Reilly died, Sir Donald Bradman said that he was the greatest bowler he had ever faced or watched. In 1935, Wisden wrote of him: "O'Reilly was one of the best examples in modern cricket of what could be described as a 'hostile' bowler." In 1939, Wisden reflected on Bill O'Reilly's successful 1938 Ashes tour of England: "He is emphatically one of the greatest bowlers of all time."
As a batsman, O'Reilly was a competent right-hander, usually batting well down the order. O'Reilly's citation as a Wisden Cricketer of the Year in 1935 said: "He had no pretensions to grace of style or any particular merit, but he could hit tremendously hard and was always a menace to tired bowlers."
As well as his skill, O'Reilly was also known for his competitiveness, and he bowled with the aggression of a paceman. In a short biographical essay on O'Reilly for the Barclays World of Cricket book, contemporary England cricketer Ian Peebles wrote that "any scoring-stroke was greeted by a testy demand for the immediate return of the ball rather than a congratulatory word. Full well did he deserve his sobriquet of 'Tiger'."
Of Irish descent, O'Reilly's paternal grandfather Peter emigrated from County Cavan, Ulster in 1865. Arriving in Sydney, he had been a policeman for four years in Ireland and continued in this line of work in New South Wales. He was sent to Deniliquin in the Riverina, where he settled and married another Irish immigrant, Bridget O'Donoghue from Ballinasloe, County Galway. O'Reilly's father, Ernest, was a school teacher and moved around the areas surrounding the Murray River to study and teach. O'Reilly's mother Mina (née Welsh) was of mixed Irish and English descent, of a third generation family from Adelaide. O'Reilly was born in the opal mining town of White Cliffs. Ernest had been appointed to open the first school in the town, and had helped to build the school and its furniture himself. Bill was the fourth child in the family, with two elder brothers and a sister.
O'Reilly's cricket skills were largely self-taught; his family moved from town to town whenever his father was posted to a different school, he had little opportunity to attend coaching. He learned to play with his brothers, playing with a "gum-wood bat and a piece of banksia root chiselled down to make a ball." He learned to bowl because his older brothers dominated the batting rights. His bowling action was far from the classic leg spin bowler's run-up and delivery, indeed, according to Wisden, "he was asked to make up the numbers in a Sydney junior match and, with a method that at first made everyone giggle, whipped out the opposition". From a young age, O'Reilly was a tall and gangly player.
In January 1908, shortly after Bill had turned two, the family moved to Murringo, after Ernest was appointed the headmaster. O'Reilly said in his autobiography Tiger that the move played no vital part in his cricket education. The area had much more vegetation than the desolate White Cliffs, and an Irish Australian majority. O'Reilly later described the period as the happiest of his life. There the children played tennis on a court on their property and took up cricket. During this time, O'Reilly's mother gave birth to another son and two more daughters. In 1917, at the age of 12, the family moved to the town of Wingello. Ernest made the decision because there were no high schools near Murringo and his older children were about to finish primary school. Nevertheless, there was no high school in Wingello where Ernest had been appointed headmaster, so O'Reilly had to catch a train to Goulburn—50 km away—to study at the local public secondary school, where his elder brother Tom had been awarded a scholarship. Wingello was a cricket town and "everyone was a cricket crank" according to O'Reilly. It was here that he developed a passion for the game. O'Reilly played in the town's team and also won the regional tennis championships. O'Reilly bowled with an action reminiscent of the windmill that his family erected in the town. However, school life was difficult, especially in the winter, as the Southern Tablelands were harsh and cold. The O'Reilly children had to leave Wingello at 7.45 am by rail and caught a slow goods train that delivered them home at 7 pm; these vehicles did not provide protection against the weather, and the boys did not participate in any school sport as the only train home left after the end of classes.
In the early 1920s, O'Reilly's eldest brother Jack moved to Sydney. One afternoon, Jack watched spin bowler Arthur Mailey in the North Sydney practice nets and managed to describe the famous bowler's 'Bosie' action in a letter to Bill. O'Reilly claims to have perfected the action of changing the spin from anticlockwise to clockwise without any discernible hand movement within a couple of days. O'Reilly said that "The bosie became my most prized possession. I practised day in, day out". Ernest decided that the train journeys and frozen limbs were too much for his son, so he sent Bill to St Patrick's College, Goulburn as a boarder in 1921, where he quickly showed his athletic flair by becoming a member of the school's rugby league, tennis, athletics and cricket teams. He held a state record for the triple jump. At the same time, he also represented the town team. During his time at St Patrick's, O'Reilly developed his ruthless and parsimonious attitude towards bowling. After three years at the Irish Catholic school, funded by a scholarship, O'Reilly completed his Leaving Certificate.
O'Reilly won a scholarship to the Sydney Teachers College at the University of Sydney, to train as a schoolmaster. However, the financial assistance was only for two years and merely sufficient for O'Reilly's rent at Glebe Point. When he was in Sydney, O'Reilly received an invitation to join an athletics club based on his performances in Goulburn, but was only able to join after the secretary Dick Corish waived his membership fee. Jumping 47 feet, he came second in a triple jump competition behind Nick Winter, who went on to win gold in the event at the 1924 Summer Olympics with a world record of 50 ft. O'Reilly also placed second in a high jumping competition, clearing six feet. Corish was also a cricket administrator and invited O'Reilly to play in a David Jones Second XI. Not knowing anything of his new recruit's abilities, Corish did not allow O'Reilly to bowl until he explicitly complained of only being allowed to field. O'Reilly promptly finished off the opposition's innings by removing the middle and lower order. After an encounter with journalist Johnny Moyes, who wrote glowingly about O'Reilly's skills.
While training as a teacher, O'Reilly joined the Sydney University Regiment, a unit of the Militia Forces (Army Reserve). He did not enjoy his time in the military, and along with most of his peers, regarded the commanding officer as inept. O'Reilly was a non-conformist who did not enjoy taking orders, and was unimpressed with the firearm drills, because the recruits were armed only with wooden sticks. However, he signed up for a second year to raise money for his education. Fed up with military routines he considered to be pointless, O'Reilly volunteered to be a kitchen hand.
During a vacation, O'Reilly caught the train from Sydney back to Wingello, which stopped at Bowral mid-journey. There, Wingello were playing the host town in a cricket match, and O'Reilly was persuaded to interrupt his journey to help his teammates. This match marked his first meeting with Bowral's 17-year-old Don Bradman, later to become his Test captain. O'Reilly himself later described thus: