William ADAMS 1885-1957

	Player number 91 (f-c debut for Northamptonshire – 26 June 1920)
Birthplace	Steeple Claydon, Buckinghamshire
First-Class	38 matches, 1,125 runs @ 18.14; 0-67; 5 catches

Northamptonshire would have been happy to see more of farmer Bill Adams and his adhesive qualities at the top of the batting order. A genuine ‘sticker’ with outstanding powers of concentration, if not a plethora of attractive strokes, left-hander Adams learned his cricket at Magdalen College School in Brackley. He played for Buckinghamshire before the First World War, turned out irregularly for Northamptonshire throughout the 1920s (the bulk of his appearances were in 1920, 1921 and 1927) and captained the side in eight of his 38 first-class matches, including the crushing defeat by an innings and 397 runs at Harrogate in 1921. Far-and-away his finest performance with the bat came in June 1927 when – against a Hampshire attack led by Jack Newman and Alex Kennedy – he scored an unbeaten 154 in nearly six hours at the crease to save the match at Southampton, after the County had followed on 216 runs behind. It was Adams’ only Championship century, although he reached three figures against Dublin University in 1926. He also demonstrated his fighting spirit by carrying his bat for an unbeaten 14 as Northamptonshire were skittled for 40 by Yorkshire’s Abe Waddington and Emmott Robinson in 1920. Adams, dubbed ‘one of the most painstaking cricketers who ever put on a pair of pads’ by a local correspondent, also played for Northants Amateurs and Horton House. One of his horses Baby Doll won the Banbury Cross Steeplechase in 1921 but it is not recorded whether any of his County team-mates invested any of their hard-earned talent money on a modest flutter.