Brian Boshier

Who was Brian Boshier?

Brian Stanley Boshier was an English cricketer who played first class cricket for Leicestershire County Cricket Club between 1953 and 1964.

Boshier, a very tall right arm seam bowler, took 510 wickets in his first class cricket career at an average of 23 runs per wicket. He was accurate in length and when conditions were helpful he used all of his 196 centimetres to extract steep bounce.

Boshier took five wickets in an innings 23 times and recorded his best figures, 8/45, against Essex in 1957, besides also taking ten wickets in a match against Lancashire in 1960. Boshier took 108 wickets in 1958, the year he was awarded his county cap, and the same number, 108, in 1961, when he finished second in the English national bowling averages for the season, but failed so badly against the Australians that he was never considered for representative honours. The following year, a succession of injuries limited Boshier to ten games, and he never recovered from these setbacks, being released by Leicestershire at the end of 1964.

A “rabbit” with no pretentions to batting ability, Boshier scored just 579 runs at an average of 4.32. Only once, against Gloucestershire in 1957, did he even reach 20 in an innings. In 1955 Boshier played his first nine innings without even scoring a run, which equalled a record set by Tom Goddard in 1923 and equalled by Seymour Clark’s infamous 1930 stint with Somerset, whilst between August 1957 and July 1959 he played fifty-two innings without reaching double figures.