All Ten: The Ultimate Bowling Feat

85 Colin Blythe glorious career which ended fifteen years later with 2,503 wickets at a cost of 16.81, and four Championships for Kent. Northampton’s Wantage Road headquarters had been used for cricket since the 1880s and for the previous ten years it had also been used by Northampton Town Football Club. Over time a stand and terracing was constructed for the winter game, but it was always an uneasy fit and in 1994 the football club finally moved from its quirky three-sided home to a proper purpose-built (but less interesting) stadium. The match against Kent wasn’t a meeting of equals. The visitors had won the Championship the previous season, and would do so three more times before 1914. Northants on the other hand had only entered the Championship two years previously and were still struggling to establish themselves. Wisden referred to ‘a deplorable lack of resolution and stability in their batting’ (best evidenced at Gloucester later in June where a promising first innings 10 for one became 12 all out). Northants no doubt viewed the game with some trepidation: their previous match, a fortnight before, had also been against Kent, at Catford, where they lost by an innings and 100 runs. The game started on Thursday 30 May, Blythe’s birthday. There was rain about and Northants didn’t even begin their first innings until Saturday. Nevertheless Kent still had the match won by half-past four, dismissing Northants twice in three and a quarter hours. Conditions were so spinner- friendly that fast bowler Arthur Fielder (172 wickets in the season) only bowled three overs. Kent began by making made 254, mainly thanks to Wally Hardinge (73) and Ken Hutchings (52). Hardinge played 606 times for Kent, a total only exceeded by Frank Woolley. His last first-class innings (hit wicket bowled Leyland 19) against Yorkshire at Dover in 1933 denied the great Hedley Verity (nine for 59) a third all-ten. One of a small number of double-internationals, he was capped by England once at cricket and once at football (while playing with Sheffield United). On a slow, soft pitch, the Northants innings began unusually, openers Walter Buswell and Mark Cox both being stumped by Fred Huish. Buswell gave great service to Northants behind the stumps, but in front of them his accomplishments were more limited: two fifties and a century in 327 innings. Things got worse and at 4 (including two leg-byes) for seven (Blythe seven for 1) the ignominy of a single-figure score seemed a distinct possibility, and would have been even more so if Blythe hadn’t missed a George Vials caught and bowled chance with the score at nine. Double figures were eventually achieved, but at 26 for nine (Blythe nine for 13) things still didn’t look too good. However, Blythe then had to sweat another twelve overs for his tenth wicket as Vials and Lancelot Driffield took the score to the dizzy heights of 60 before Blythe bowled fellow left- arm spinner Driffield soon after lunch. The youngest man in the team, the 20-year-old Vials would give Northants cricket great service, especially as captain in 1912 when the county were Championship runners up, and as president for twelve years from 1956. Both Vials and William Wells who followed him to the wicket would make two first-class centuries, a feat which six of the side failed to achieve even once. The home crowd enthusiastically applauded both Blythe’s feat, and their