The Summer Field

130 looked concerned about the stricken batsman (‘bad public relations on my part’). Batsmen, naturally, had something to say. Aidan Crawley in The Field in June 1936 asked only for honesty: ‘Apologise by all means after you have hurt the batsman …. It is absurd to pretend that fear is not the fast bowler’s greatest asset and sloppy to refuse to use it.’ Jardine took the fast bowler’s side. On July 20, 1934, at the start of the fourth Test at Leeds, and after yet more colossal scores by England and Australia in the third at Manchester, he wrote in the Evening Standard: ‘At this rate genuine fast bowling will soon be at a discount. I don’t believe that such wickets however fair they may be to both sides are genuinely in the best interests of the game today.’ While not harking back to bodyline – he had no need to – Jardine called for wickets ‘less like featherbeds’ and ‘general appreciation of the fact that when a batsman is hit it is not the bowler’s fault that the batsman covers up and is too clumsy or slow to use the bat for the purpose for which it is intended’. The next day Bradman was on his way to 304. As ever, as interesting was what batsmen did not admit, at least not publicly so that bowlers could hear. Cardus quoted Maurice Leyland (including his bad grammar) in his obituary: ‘The fact is that none of us like fast bowling, but some of us doesn’t let on.’ Only the very fastest bowling bothered the very best batsmen. It took less to unnerve lesser players. ‘Mid On’, the reporter for the Bridgnorth Journal , in May 1938 spoke to Sydney Barnes, before he bowled unchanged and took seven for 17 for Bridgnorth against Stetchford: Although over 60 years [in fact Barnes had turned 65; presumably by then it suited him to play down his age] he looks a man 20 years younger and when he once got into action, the old run over 12 yards, one could visualise him in the days when he struck terror into the hearts of the Australians. Here was yet another case of an English cricket follower obsessed by Australia. ‘Maybe a little of the dash and speed may have been missing but the guile and subtlety were there together with an impeccable length.’ As Mid On neatly put it, ‘there is something in a name’, because the first thing that Stetchford players asked was whether Barnes were playing. Batsmen had long had reason to fear what a bowler could do. In June 1929 Nobby Clark hit Frank Woolley over the eye and Plaindealer saw the Kent batsman at Chesterfield wearing a plaster. In August 1840, when Nottinghamshire played a Burton and Chaddesden eleven on ‘Clarke’s ground’, the modern Trent Bridge, the home team’s top scorer, a Mr Musters, was ‘much punished by the severity of Dakin’s bowling’, the Derby Mercury reported. The next day Musters carried his arm in a sling, ‘and his party was subsequently deprived of his valuable assistance’. Showing it’s a small world, that guilty bowler Samuel Dakin was playing for 22 of Derbyshire at Derby in August 1849 when William Clarke, bowling as captain of the All-England eleven, hit the home wicketkeeper Thomas Hunt in the eye so that one side of his face was ‘totally disfigured’. Batting and Bowling