Edwin "Eddie" Legard (23 August 1935 – 29 January 2020) was an English

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 in 20

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 ...

matches for

Warwickshire Warwickshire (; abbreviated Warks) is a county in the West Midlands region of England. The county town is Warwick, and the largest town is Nuneaton. The county is famous for being the birthplace of William Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon an ...

between 1962 and 1968. He was born in

Barnsley Barnsley () is a market town in South Yorkshire, England. As the main settlement of the Metropolitan Borough of Barnsley and the fourth largest settlement in South Yorkshire. In Barnsley, the population was 96,888 while the wider Borough has ...

Yorkshire Yorkshire ( ; abbreviated Yorks), formally known as the County of York, is a Historic counties of England, historic county in northern England and by far the largest in the United Kingdom. Because of its large area in comparison with other Eng ...

. Legard was a lower-order right-handed batsman and a wicketkeeper. He played for

's second eleven in both the Minor Counties and

Second Eleven Championship The Second XI Championship is a season-long cricket competition in England that is competed for by the reserve teams of those county cricket clubs that have first-class status. The competition started in 1959 and has been contested annually ever ...

competitions between 1954 and 1959, winning the

Minor Counties Championship The NCCA 3 Day Championship (previously the Minor Counties Cricket Championship) is a season-long competition in England and Wales that is contested by the members of the National Counties Cricket Association (NCCA), the so-called national cou ...

in both 1957 and 1958. But he was unable to dislodge his contemporary

Jimmy Binks James Graham Binks (born 5 October 1935) is a former English cricketer who played as a wicket-keeper for Yorkshire County Cricket Club, Yorkshire. Although he was regarded by many as the best wicket-keeper of his generation, his limited batting ...

from the Yorkshire first team, and Binks' remarkable immunity from injury and from being rested meant there were no opportunities whatsoever, so from 1960, Legard started qualifying for Warwickshire. From 1961, however, the former

Oxford University Oxford () is a city in England. It is the county town and only city of Oxfordshire. In 2020, its population was estimated at 151,584. It is north-west of London, south-east of Birmingham and north-east of Bristol. The city is home to the ...

captain A. C. Smith became Warwickshire's regular wicketkeeper, and Legard's opportunities were again restricted. Legard finally made his first-class debut in 1962, appearing in four matches that season and in five the following year, mostly when Smith was called up for representative matches. He was awarded his county cap in 1963. Against Oxford University in that season, he had seven wicketkeeping victims in the match, with six catches and one stumping, three of the catches coming off the bowling of Smith who, after Legard had left the county, increasingly turned his hand to medium-pace bowling. In the mid-1960s, however, Legard was not able to displace Smith from the regular first team as wicketkeeper, and after the 1964 season his appearances over the remaining four years that he was on the Warwickshire staff were confined to non- Championship matches; of his 20 first-class games in all, only four were in the Championship. He left Warwickshire after the 1968 season and retired the following year.

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* {{DEFAULTSORT:Legard, Eddie 1935 births 2020 deaths English cricketers Warwickshire cricketers Cricketers from Barnsley