Ernest George Murdock was an English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 cricket

Cricket

Cricket is a bat-and-ball game played between two teams of 11 players on an oval-shaped field, at the centre of which is a rectangular 22-yard long pitch. One team bats, trying to score as many runs as possible while the other team bowls and fields, trying to dismiss the batsmen and thus limit the...

er who played first-class cricket

First-class cricket

First-class cricket is a class of cricket that consists of matches of three or more days' scheduled duration, that are between two sides of eleven players and are officially adjudged first-class by virtue of the standard of the competing teams...

 for Somerset

Somerset County Cricket Club

Somerset County Cricket Club is one of the 18 major county clubs which make up the English and Welsh domestic cricket structure, representing the historic county of Somerset...

 in 1885 and for Gloucestershire

Gloucestershire County Cricket Club

Gloucestershire County Cricket Club is one of the 18 major county clubs which make up the English and Welsh national cricket structure, representing the historic county of Gloucestershire. Its limited overs team is called the Gloucestershire Gladiators....

 in 1889. He was born at Keynsham

Keynsham

Keynsham is a town and civil parish between Bristol and Bath in Somerset, south-west England. It has a population of 15,533.It was listed in the Domesday Book as Cainesham, which is believed to mean the home of Saint Keyne....

, Somerset

Somerset

The ceremonial and non-metropolitan county of Somerset in South West England borders Bristol and Gloucestershire to the north, Wiltshire to the east, Dorset to the south-east, and Devon to the south-west. It is partly bounded to the north and west by the Bristol Channel and the estuary of the...

 and died at Bower Ashton

Bower Ashton

Bower Ashton is a small district in south west Bristol on the western boundary with North Somerset, lying within the Southville ward, approximately two miles from the city centre...

, also in Somerset.

Murdock was a right-handed lower-order batsman. In his two first-class matches for Somerset in 1885, he kept wicket at the time when Somerset was struggling to raise a full side; his highest first-class score of 14 was made in the first of these two matches, against Surrey

Surrey County Cricket Club

Surrey County Cricket Club is one of the 18 professional county clubs which make up the English and Welsh domestic cricket structure, representing the historic county of Surrey. Its limited overs team is called the Surrey Lions...

 at The Oval

The Oval

The Kia Oval, still commonly referred to by its original name of The Oval, is an international cricket ground in Kennington, in the London Borough of Lambeth. In the past it was also sometimes called the Kennington Oval...

. Somerset lost its first-class status after the 1885 season and Murdock played some matches for the team in non-first-class cricket up to 1888. In 1889, however, he switched allegiance to Gloucestershire, where he appeared in three games in the season, achieving little with the bat, not keeping wicket, but bowling a little and taking the solitary first-class wicket of his career in his final first-class match.