All Ten: The Ultimate Bowling Feat

6 Introduction For a bowler, taking all ten wickets in an innings is the ultimate statistical feat. It has been achieved only 81 times in nearly 60,000 first-class matches, although it is perhaps surprising that it has been achieved even that often. Assuming that in many cases the conditions were helpful to bowlers or the opposition weak you might expect that the bowlers at the other end would take at least one wicket – Jim Laker taking all-ten twice in 1956 whilst the prolific Tony Lock went wicketless is an obvious example. Sometimes chance plays a part, a batsman playing and missing or a fielder dropping a catch, whether on purpose or not. Until the 1960s all-tens had been relatively common in England and Wales, but they have since become rare with only two in the last fifty years. We could speculate on the reasons. Pitches are covered, wickets are generally less helpful to spinners (although many all-tens have been taken by quicker bowlers), the number of leg-side fielders has been restricted. Over the same period overseas bowlers have begun to catch up, taking 12 all-tens and bringing the total taken overseas to 21. Although all-tens have been reasonably well spread chronologically there were five in 1921 and four in 1956. Why? It was probably just chance. The weather was bad in 1956 and unfriendly to batsmen, but 1954 and 1958 were also spectactularly poor summers and nobody managed an all-ten. The figures below show the change in the frequency of all-tens over time. The 10,000th first-class match was played in July 1921, by which time the feat had been performed 32 times. The rate held up reasonably well over the next 10,000 matches played, but has clearly fallen sharply since. Number of first-class matches played Number of all-tens 1 - 5,000 (August 1898) 18 5,001 - 10,000 (July 1921) 14 10,001 - 20,000 (May 1953) 24 20,001 - 30,000 (February 1974) 13 30,001 - 40,000 (June 1992) 5 40,001 - 50,000 (March 2007) 4 50,001 - 58,000 (September 2017) 3 81 In the first 19 years after the Second World War there were 12 all-tens in England, of which nine occurred on outgrounds, a disparity not apparent between the Wars. There is certainly evidence that at some of these grounds conditions were particularly favourable to bowlers, presumably because of the limited pitch preparation compared with that at headquarters, but whether this was true at other grounds would need further investigation.