The Summer Field

118 best knew, rather than a man from a remoter shire. More honest was the former Lincolnshire captain Ron Turner. ‘Selectors are human brings after all,’ he wrote. In a sparse county, particularly, ‘it is not easy to get all the best players together at one time, therefore it is inevitable that some towns feel that on occasions their cricketers may have been overlooked when such is not the case.’ Turner seemed to shy away from admitting selectors did an imperfect job; the problem lay, he claimed, in the perception of others. What players and their friends wanted was the most that selectors could give, ‘a fair chance of proving their mettle’ as Plaindealer put it in May 1932. He praised Yorkshire from Lord Hawke’s days; rather than give a man one chance, so that he would bat ‘with teeth chattering with fright lest he should miss one, the only opportunity of his life’, a colt would have three or four matches, ‘at least’. As the Leicester columnist Reynard said in June 1920, admitting that others had said it before, county cricketers were ‘not made in a day’. ‘It takes three years in county cricket to make a county cricketer,’ Sir Home Gordon wrote in a 1909 article in The Windsor Magazine , quoting Lord Hawke. Ray Illingworth in his 1969 book Spinner’s Wicket reckoned it took at least three years. And learning the job of county captain would take a young man five years, said Herbert Sutcliffe in For England and Yorkshire in 1935. If selectors had to think so far ahead, they had to be sure they recruited right. Selectors, and spectators, had to show some patience. Selection, so Reynard reminded his readers in July 1924 while Leicestershire were struggling, was not only for a match or even a season, but for blooding youths for further ahead while you had the chance. Picking players was easy – 38 batted and 26 bowled for Derbyshire in their wretched 1920 season. Major Eardley-Thompson explained in his 1936 book that ‘on more than one occasion it was not easy to find a full eleven’. While those first years after a world war that took young men were an exception, the rule was that supply had to meet demand. Players seeking selection, and selectors, were in a market that counties long ran, in their own interests, on feudal lines. You could only play for your county of birth or residence, and if you moved job to qualify by residence, how would you eat in the meantime? Counties did enforce the residence rule, as men found to their cost. In 1951 John William Haywood sent his story to the Leicestershire historian E.E.Snow. ‘First of all I was born at Harby, Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire on April 17, 1878,’ he wrote on cheap lined paper. ‘I had a trial with Notts and was signed on the same day.’ Later that day, Nottinghamshire found that Harby was not on their side of the Vale of Belvoir, ‘and then squashed the engagement. I came to Leicester for a trial about two seasons later and was signed on the staff.’ After three first-class matches in three years, in 1903 he joined Oakham School as coach. Nor did the rules only apply to nobodies; Sydney Barnes, having qualified for Lancashire through league cricket, fell out with that county and had to fall back on his native Staffordshire, playing for the minor county, a Potteries league team on Saturdays, and for England and anyone else who would pay him – a freelance 21 st century-sounding arrangement in cricket and work generally. Selection and Recruitment