All Ten: The Ultimate Bowling Feat

48 Albert Moss matches involving a touring (second string) New South Wales side that drew one match and won the others easily. A domestic championship, the Plunket Shield, was still nearly twenty years away. The match was played at Hagley Oval, in the beautiful Hagley Park, named in honour of the Lyttelton family seat in Worcestershire. The other two home matches that Moss played for Canterbury took place at Lancaster Park, the main first- class ground in Christchurch until it was damaged irreparably by the 2011 earthquake. Having been played there spasmodically until 1921, first-class cricket has returned to the Oval on a more regular basis in recent years. Twenty-six wickets fell on a first day played in bright sunshine before a small crowd. English-born Moss would not have felt alone: three players on each side had been born ‘back home’, and in fact only seven had been born in New Zealand, the remainder coming from Australia (6), Scotland (2) and Fiji (1). Canterbury batted first, 20-year-old Andrew Labatt top scoring with 47. Moss, going in last, began his brief first-class career with a duck to give Charles Dryden his seventh wicket, to which he would add another five in Canterbury’s second innings. (Some sources describe Dryden as a leg-spinner, others as bowling medium pace). As Moss would only score 13 runs in eight first-class innings, nought wasn’t a bad score. Getting considerable lift from a pitch still affected by overnight rain, Moss then began to demolish the Wellington innings. The Wellington team wasn’t used to making big scores. Between them the eleven played 144 first-class matches, accumulating fewer than 3,000 runs, with no centuries. Also there was a suggestion that the journey to the match had left some of the team still suffering from the effects of seasickness. First to go was their Australian-born captain William Salmon, caught by Scottish-born wicketkeeper George Marshall. (Marshall only kept occasionally and, according to Mike Batty’s article about Moss’s feat in The Cricket Statistician 143 , the contemporary press referred to him as short-stop). Robert Blacklock joined younger brother Arthur, but not for long, and after that a steady procession of single figure dismissals left the visitors 28 for six. It might have been worse. The younger Blacklock was missed by George Rayner at long leg off Charles Garrard with only two wickets down (and so of course an all-ten might only have been a nine- for), and Moss dropped Edgar Brooke, an easy chance, off his own bowling. Brooke eventually misjudged a Moss slower ball and was caught at mid on by Canterbury captain Edward Cotterill before an aggressive seventh wicket partnership of 29 between William McGirr and Alexander Littlejohn at least provided some resistance. In the circumstances McGirr’s 20 was a considerable achievement given that he had had to bat with a runner (Robert Blacklock), having strained a ligament while bowling. He lived long enough to see his son Herb play two Test matches against Harold Gilligan’s 1929/30 MCC tourists. At 38 years 101 days Herb still remains New Zealand’s oldest Test debutant. Once McGirr left, well caught at slip by Edward Barnes, Moss quickly polished off the tail, Sydney Nicholls falling to another well disguised slower ball, William Ogier and Henry Wallace to yorkers. Moss’s figures were the cheapest all-ten to date, and might have been even better had he