The Summer Field

117 of ten and brought in his field to about the distance he would expect a small boy to hit the ball’. As Plaindealer added, Higson did make ‘two as fine “plugs” into the deep as one could hope to see and retired amidst the plaudits of the crowd’, leg before for 21. Yet the reporter asked why Derbyshire’s ‘nursery lads’ had to wait their chance behind Higson, an amateur out of his league (‘his proper class looked at the beginning of his innings to be about eighth for Cubley’, a village near Ashbourne). Higson went on to play unremarkably for Lancashire, where his father was chairman. Selections were seldom as easy to question, though that did not stop critics. Whereas you could judge a bridge, or a shelf you nailed up in the kitchen, by whether it stayed up or it fell, in team selection, like beauty in art, everyone could be an expert. If, as E.E.Snow wrote in Leicestershire’s 1957 yearbook, the standard of first-class cricket in a county largely depended on its clubs; and if, as many agreed, the step from a town club to a county was great, as from a school to Oxbridge, how to find youths that could bridge those gaps? You only knew by trying. To take the 1920 season as an example. The 38-year-old George Shingler, who had played in leagues in Lancashire and Scotland before the 1914-18 war, made his debut for Leicestershire after keen fielding as a substitute. The local press praised Shingler’s ‘gameness’. However, Shingler was dropped for C.L.M.Brown, the son of a country vicar who was studying at Cambridge. As it happened, Shingler (73 runs in six innings) and Brown (52 in seven) each flopped. Some selectors tried to pretend they knew best; such as Plum Warner who with his usual humbug told Leicestershire’s dinner for the visiting Australians in 1926 that ‘he had an intelligence department everywhere’. Warner was hardly going to admit that he would try to please most people by picking a man from the most powerful, metropolitan counties that he Selection and Recruitment Middlesex, 1947 county champions. Another team picture whose arrangement and posture of the men leave you in no doubt that Walter Robins was a captain in charge.