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 st ...

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 officia ...

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 m ...

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 List of islands of New Zealand, smaller islands. It is the ...

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 fo ...

, 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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