Tom Wills Cricketer

Thomas Wentworth "Tom" Wills (19 August 1835 – 2 May 1880) was a 19th-century sportsman who is credited with being Australia's first cricketer of significance and a pioneer of the sport of Australian rules football.Born in the British colony of New South Wales to a wealthy family descended from convicts, Wills grew up on properties owned by his father, the pastoralist and nationalist Horatio Wills, in what is now the Australian state of Victoria. He befriended local Aborigines, learning many aspects of their culture. At the age of 14, Wills was sent to England to attend Rugby School, where he became captain of Rugby's cricket team, and played an early version of rugby football. After Rugby, Wills represented the Cambridge University Cricket Club in the annual match against Oxford, and played in first-class matches for Kent and the Marylebone Cricket Club. An athletic all-rounder with devastating bowling analyses, he was regarded as one of the finest young cricketers in England.Returning to Victoria in 1856, Wills achieved Australia-wide stardom as a cricketer, captaining the Victorian team to repeated victories in intercolonial matches. He played for many clubs, most prominently the Melbourne Cricket Club, for which he served as honorary secretary. In 1858 he called for the formation of a "foot-ball club" with a "code of laws" to keep cricketers fit during the off-season. After founding the Melbourne Football Club the following year, Wills and three other members codified the first laws of Australian rules football. He and his cousin H. C. A. Harrison spearheaded the new sport as players and administrators.In 1861, at the height of his fame, Wills joined his father on a trek to Queensland to establish a family property. Two weeks after their arrival, Wills' father and 18 others were murdered in the largest massacre of European settlers by Aborigines in Australian history. Wills survived and returned to Victoria in 1864. He continued to play football and cricket, and, in 1866–67, coached and captained an Aboriginal cricket team—the first Australian XI to tour England. In a career marked by controversy, Wills straddled the divide between amateur and professional cricketers, and was frequently accused of bending rules to the point of cheating. He was no-balled twice for throwing in 1872 and mounted a failed comeback four years later on the brink of the birth of Test cricket, by which time his sporting glory belonged to a colonial past that seemed "quaint and old fashioned". Psychological trauma from the massacre was worsened by his alcoholism. Now destitute, Wills was admitted to the Melbourne Hospital in 1880, suffering from delirium tremens, but shortly afterwards escaped and returned to his home in Heidelberg, where he committed suicide by stabbing a pair of scissors through his heart.Wills fell into obscurity after his death, but since the 1990s, he has undergone a resurgence in Australian culture. He was an inaugural inductee into the Australian Football Hall of Fame, and is commemorated with a statue outside the Melbourne Cricket Ground. In modern times he is characterised as an archetype of the fallen sports hero, and as a symbol of reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. The claim of an Aboriginal influence on Wills' conception of Australian football has been the subject of heated debate. According to biographer Greg de Moore, Wills "stands alone in all his absurdity, his cracked egalitarian heroism and his fatal self-destructiveness—the finest cricketer and footballer of the age."

Personal facts

Alias (AKA)	Wills Tom
Birth date	August 19, 1835
Birth name	Thomas Wentworth Wills
Birth place	New South Wales , Molonglo Plain
Date of death	May 02, 1880
Place of death	Victoria (Australia) , Heidelberg Victoria
Known for	Australian rules football