Colin Cowdrey
Cowdrey won a Heath Harrison Exhibition award and a place at Brasenose College at Oxford University to study geography in the autumn of 1951. He played for the Oxford University Cricket Club in 1952 and 1953 at the start of the season and the rest of the summer for Kent. He made 50 and 57 for the Gentlemen vs the 1953 Australians at Lords. In 1954 he captained Oxford University and was a surprise choice for the MCC tour of Australia, replacing Willie Watson. Len Hutton later told him that his selection was a gamble, but it was thought that his technique would be good on the hard Australian wickets. At 21, Cowdrey was the youngest man in the side and the schoolboy photographs used in the brochures made him appear younger. He had yet to make a century in the County Championship, go on tour or play a Test, though he was made twelfth man for the Fourth Test against Pakistan and fielded for 20 minutes, but was so nervous he could barely watch.
Cuthbert Ottaway
Though Ottaway represented Gentlemen against Players three times (in 1870, 1872 and 1876) – the highest honour available to a cricketer in the years before the advent of Tests – he is perhaps better known for playing in four Varsity Matches against Cambridge. The most notable of these was the first, in 1870 – a game still remembered as "Cobden's Match". Scoring 69 in Oxford's second innings and taking an exceptional catch one-handed at long on, Ottaway played a full part in helping his teammates to a position in which, with three wickets remaining, they needed to score four runs to win the game. Bets were taken among the spectators at 100–1 on for Oxford to win from this position, but they were thwarted by the Cambridge bowler Frank Cobden, who – having conceded one run from the first ball of his four-ball over – took a hat-trick with his last three balls to leave Ottaway's team two runs short of a tie and three short of the total required for victory. "By superior bowling and infinitely superior fielding," commented Geoffrey Bolton's "History of the OUCC", "Oxford reached a position where they could not lose; and they lost."