William Alfred Cate (22 November 1878 – 22 October 1939) was a

cricketer Cricket is a bat-and-ball game played between two teams of eleven players on a field at the centre of which is a pitch with a wicket at each end, each comprising two bails balanced on three stumps. The batting side scores runs by striki ...

who played four matches of

first-class cricket First-class cricket, along with List A cricket and Twenty20 cricket, is one of the highest-standard forms of cricket. A first-class match is one of three or more days' scheduled duration between two sides of eleven players each and is officiall ...

for

Wellington Wellington ( mi, Te Whanganui-a-Tara or ) is the capital city of New Zealand. It is located at the south-western tip of the North Island, between Cook Strait and the Remutaka Range. Wellington is the second-largest city in New Zealand by me ...

between 1908 and 1922, and represented

New Zealand New Zealand ( mi, Aotearoa ) is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and over 700 smaller islands. It is the sixth-largest island count ...

in 1922–23. Alf Cate worked as a

wool classer Wool classing is the production of uniform, predictable, low-risk lines of wool, carried out by examining the characteristics of the wool in its raw state and classing (grading) it accordingly. Wool classing is done by a wool classer. Basis for ...

, and taught wool classing at the Hutt Valley Memorial Technical College for 25 years. He and his wife had a daughter. He made his first-class debut in 1908, but then had to wait until 1920 before he played again, partly because Wellington had New Zealand representative wicket-keepers in Jeremiah Mahoney and James Condliffe in this period, but also because he was unable to make himself available. Despite his age (44) and lack of first-class experience, Cate replaced Condliffe as New Zealand's wicket-keeper in the third of the three matches New Zealand played against MCC in 1922–23. It was his last first-class match. The former New Zealand captain Tom Cobcroft, writing in the ''New Zealand Truth'', regarded Cate still as New Zealand's best wicket-keeper in 1925, when Cate was 47, hampered by ill-health, and playing only club cricket for Petone in Wellington.

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* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Cate, Alf 1878 births 1939 deaths New Zealand cricketers Pre-1930 New Zealand representative cricketers Wellington cricketers Sportspeople from Upper Hutt Wicket-keepers

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