All Ten: The Ultimate Bowling Feat

116 Hollies all-ten 24 years later. On past performance Notts’ nine, ten and eleven wouldn’t have been expected to contribute much, but they did at least do better than the top order. (Six years later, after many moderate seasons with the bat, fast bowler Fred Barratt suddenly more than doubled his previous best output and made 1,167 runs.) There was a little drama at the end of the innings. Collins could be rather slow in the field. With nine wickets down (all to Collins) the burly Barratt, facing Freeman, gave Collins a chance to which he was slow to move and failed to take. He was understandably concerned that the crowd would think this deliberate (although given the position of the match it was unlikely to have affected the result). And then in the next over it was Freeman himself who took a brilliant catch to give Collins his all-ten! A few years later the voracious Freeman would achieve the feat a record three times, but this time he had bowled 20 unrewarded overs. Collins’ figures (innings and match) were, and presumably always will be, a Dover record. At the time they were also the second best match, and third best innings, figures for Kent. Perhaps surprised by his success, The Times commented ‘He certainly is quite one of our most extraordinary cricketers……he never appears to know quite what he is about to do’. The Cricketer said that he was ‘a cricketer of moods, with the most tender heart imaginable’. They may have been right: five wickets in the Lancashire first innings in his next match (‘good bowling by Collins’: The Times ), was followed by one for 85 against Middlesex when his bowling was ‘the most amiable, stingless matter imaginable’. Umpire Brown, only appointed to the county first-class list in 1921 after previously umpiring Minor County, mainly Durham, matches, had now already umpired his second all-ten, having stood the previous season when Mailey had performed the feat. Collins’ last match, perhaps appropriately, was against Nottinghamshire at Gravesend at the end of May 1928. For him it was a low-key affair as he injured his finger fielding on the first day, bowled only nine wicketless overs and was then unfit to bat as Kent stumbled to an innings defeat. He had never taken 100 wickets in a season, his best year being 1923 when he took 90, as well as scoring over 1,000 runs for the only time. The closest he came to representative cricket was touring the West Indies (before they attained Test status) with Freddie Calthorpe’s MCC team in 1925/26. In the event he had little success and played only five matches on the tour. In all he took 379 first-class wickets at an average of 23.91 and scored just over 6,000 runs at an average of 22.11. After retirement Collins became groundsman at the Officers Club, Aldershot (where he also umpired one first-class match: Army v South Americans in 1932). He died in Rochester in 1949 aged 59. George Collins