deliveries columns catches/stumpings year tenfor bowling country fivefor batting image name lasttestyear caption column international testdebutdate source date runs testdebutyear wickets lasttestdate s/s matches article_title
120 7,824 2 1/0 152/0 1879 0 0 right-arm slow english 0 4 right-hand bat ap lucas.jpg a. p. lucas 1884 a p lucas tests first-class true 2 january http://content.cricinfo.com/england/content/player/16364.html 2 january 157 10,263 1879 0 155 23 july 0/1 8/50 5 256 a. p. lucas

a. p. lucas

alfred perry -lrb- `` bunny '' -rrb- lucas -lrb- 20 february 1857 in westminster , london -- 12 october 1923 in great waltham , essex -rrb- was an english first-class cricketer from 1874 to 1907 , playing for cambridge university , surrey , middlesex and essex .
he also played five test matches for england .
lucas was educated at uppingham school and clare college , cambridge .
even as a seventeen-year-old , lucas proved himself an exceptional batsman with an innings of 136 against mcc and in a review when greville stevens was picked as a schoolboy for the gentlemen in 1919 , was described as good enough to be selected himself .
lucas did play twice for surrey and caused a sensation at prince 's with an innings of 48 against alfred shaw and fred morley at their best .
his reputation established , lucas , eighteen , went to cambridge university in 1875 and solidified his reputation as a batsman with the rare gift of combining style with extremely solid defence for both the university and in the holidays for surrey .
1876 saw lucas advance into the top league of batsmen , with 818 runs at an average of thirty being exceptional for the time and placing him among the top batsmen in the game .
1877 saw lucas make a further advance , being in average behind only the incomparable wg grace and achieving his highest first class aggregagte for a season of 832 runs .
he also showed himself a useful slow bowler , taking 34 wickets for less than fourteen each , and as late as 1882 achieved his best first-class bowling of six wickets for ten runs against his old university for the `` gentlemen of england '' -- ironically lucas also achieved his highest first-class score of 145 in the same match !
however , opinions as to the quality of lucas ' bowling were not positive even then and he almost never bowled after 1882 .
still , lucas ' batting in the middle to late 1870s was good enough for him to be a regular for the gentlemen from 1876 and to play for `` england '' teams against a combined kent and gloucestershire team in 1876 and against gloucestershire alone the following year .
business prevented lucas touring australia with the first test-playing team in 1876/1877 , but despite being rather disappointing in his last year at cambridge lucas made his only tour in 1878/1879 under lord harris , when he did much more bowling than he would ordinarily have done owing to the absence of any specialist bowler except tom emmett .
although he played only ten first-class games in 1879 despite being the official captain of surrey , lucas returned to form under severely difficult conditions due to the abominable weather and was selected for the first test team in england the following year , where he made 55 , his only fifty in five tests .
at the end of 1882 lucas moved away from surrey and played for middlesex under a birth qualification from 1883 , when he remained near the top of the first-class batting averages .
he achieved the rare feat of carrying his bat through an innings for the gentlemen at the oval , and played an innings of 72 at lord 's .
lucas played in the first two tests of the 1884 season without doing anything worthy of his reputation apart from a dour 15 not out on a sticky wicket in the first match .
owing to his work for the london stock exchange , nothing more was seen of lucas in first-class cricket until 1887 , when despite an exceptional summer he was again disappointing .
in 1889 , coming to the aid of his good friend c.e. green , lucas began to play for essex , in which he had been residing since 1883 , and captaining the side until 1894 .
however , he played only two first-class matches from 1890 to 1893 and when essex joined the county championship in 1895 , his profession restricted lucas to a few games in 1895 and 1896 .
he then played fairly regularly for essex until 1901 , and if not quite the outstanding batsman of twenty years beforehand , lucas still was a model of soundness and style .
his work as a banker again began to severely restrict his cricket from 1902 , but whenever he could play lucas remained valuable up to his last match at the age of fifty .
although known to his chums as `` bunny '' , he is referred to in all cricket sources , including contemporary reports , either by his surname or as `` a. p. lucas '' .
to the players under his leadership , he was simply `` the boss '' .
