Double Headers

76 1949 3-5-6 Sept North v South Scarborough Drawn 3-5-6 Sept South / South of England v New Zealanders Hastings NZ 1950 2-4-5 Sept South v North Kingston North 2-4-5 Sept South / South of England v West Indians Hastings Drawn 1952 3-4-5 Sept England XI / An England XI v Indians Hastings Drawn 3-4-5 Sept England XI v Commonwealth XI Kingston C’wealth Snippets from these matches: •In the game against the South Africans at Hastings in 1904, Gilbert Jessop scored 159* in 120 minutes out of a team total of 237 all out. •Needing 159 to win in the fourth innings in the match at Bournemouth in 1905, the Australians were 153-6, but their eighth and ninth wickets fell with the scores level, before the last pair scored the winning run. The match aggregated 861 runs for 39 wickets, but the highest individual innings was only 52. •There was also a close finish in the other game in 1905. Lancashire needed 169 to win after a third-innings declaration, but their seventh wicket fell off the fourth ball of the last over, with the scores level, and at that point the game ended. Under today’s laws the result would have been a draw, but under the laws prevailing at the time, it was recorded as a tie. •On the same dates as the two ‘South’ sides were playing at Scarborough and Hastings in 1947, a further first-class fixture ‘Surrey & Kent v Middlesex & Essex’ was being played at Kingston. There was definitely no shortage of opportunities for southern cricketers at the end of that long, hot summer! What is more, of the 22 ‘South’ players at Scarborough and Hastings, 11 were from one of the four counties who were also providing players for the match at Kingston, and six more players from those counties were included in Sir Pelham Warner’s XI at Hastings. And yet there was no room for even a single Hampshire player in any of the sides. •In the North’s second innings at Kingston in 1950, Dennis Brookes was dismissed for 171, which took him to exactly 2000 runs for the season. Near misses These are of three types: instances where the names of two simultaneously- playing teams were similar but all sources are agreed that they were not identical; instances involving MCC sides that had fuller names than just ‘MCC’; and instances involving matches that were not both regarded as first-class matches, but which just might have been. Other instances in the British Isles