"Charge him, sah!" Ireland's first Wisden Cricketer of the Year

At midnight last night Wisden announced its Five Cricketers Of The Year, an annual tradition dragged into the 21st century by the fact that this year there are only four - the fifth would have been one of the Pakistani cricketers banned for spot-fixing cricket matches last summer.

One of the lucky quartet to make the cut is Eoin Morgan, the Irish batsman who has become a key part of the England set-up. However, Morgan is not – as many including me initially suspected - the first Irishman to be selected as one of the cricket bible’s players of the year. In fact he’s not even the first Dubliner. That particular honour goes to the remarkable and eccentric figure of Robert Montagu Poore, one of Wisden’s cricketers of the year in 1900.

Born at Carysfort House in Blackrock, Dublin, on 20 March 1866, Poore showed no interest in cricket until well into his twenties; taking up the game after being posted to India in the army (he would serve in the Boer War and the First World War, eventually becoming a Brigadier-General).

He learned the game by watching matches and studying the Badminton Book “as thoroughly as though he had had to get it up for an examination” according to an interview he gave Cricket magazine, but took to it so well that when stationed in South Africa in 1896 he was selected for the South African team to play against England, appearing in three Test matches.

It wasn’t until he was posted to Britain in 1898 that Poore played in England, but it was the 1899 season that was to make his name and earn him the Wisden accolade. He scored 1,551 runs for Hampshire at an average of 91.23 - including a triple hundred against Somerset – an average not bettered in England until Don Bradman in 1930.

The outbreak of the Boer War curtailed his season and would keep him militarily occupied for the next three years. A badly broken arm in 1902 meant that Poore would not play serious cricket again until 1904 but he would never approached the giddy heights of 1899.

Cricket was just one of his sporting dalliances however: he was one of the finest swordsmen in the army, a gifted polo player and was the West of India tennis champion.

At 6’ 4” Poore certainly stood out, while his insistence on wearing a pith helmet while fielding was just one factor in him being described thus by one cricket writer: "of all the people in the history of the game he seems to stand for the Eccentric Ideal.”

He remained robust and opinionated well into his retirement: when a few years before Poore’s death in 1938 a young cricketer solicited his advice on the best way to face the fearsome pace of Harold Larwood, Poore bellowed, “Charge him, sah! Fix your bayonet and charge him!”