The Summer Field

134 batsman to do better than he did. The laugh was on him. * Norms change. In July 1875 at Sheffield, in one of his three first-class matches for Gloucestershire, Rowland Brotherhood bowled ‘fast underhands’ in place of G.F.Grace as Yorkshire neared a seven-wicket win. ‘His first ball pitched nicely over Andrew’s [Greenwood’s] head and when his first over was a maiden the spectators gave him a round of applause, which he suitably acknowledged,’ the Sheffield Evening Star reported. Underarm bowling, though unusual in 1875, still had a place; gradually it became rarer, lingering in lower classes of cricket. Another Grace brother, E.M., ‘regularly took his hundred wickets (with underhands)’ in club cricket into his sixties and until 1908, Sir Home Gordon wrote in The Windsor Magazine in 1909. By then under-hand bowling was significantly something to put in brackets; no longer part of the regular game. As for batting, Victorians did not seem to mind slow scoring by 21 st century standards, above all in single-wicket matches. In September 1840 for instance, when two Nottingham men played three Leicester men, they ‘stood’ 684 balls in their combined first five innings, ‘played’ 475 of them and scored a mere 59 runs – that is, in 114 modern overs. Slowest was the Nottingham man Barker who stood 149 balls, played 101, and ‘marked none’. And to take two two-day matches at Burton with the fullest records, in July 1861 Leicestershire lost (106 and 75 to 53 and 123). That match total of 363 runs came in 965 balls, or 160.5 modern overs. Likewise, when Nottingham Diamonds won in June 1862, 243 runs came in 710 balls, or 118.2 six-ball overs. Whether because few Victorians could bowl well enough, or because bowling was too much like hard work, few did bowl. In the longest innings of those two-day matches, when Burton batted for 356 balls, all but eight were bowled by two men. By bringing in 20-overs a side, and four-day matches instead of three, English professional cricket around 2000 was going to the extremes of fast and slow batting at the same time; in 20-over a side games, anyone scoring at less than a run a ball for long was a menace to his team, or might even appear in the pay of a gambler. Cyril Smart’s trinity barely applied any more. Likewise, bowling four overs at a run a ball or less, unremarkable or plain bad elsewhere, was a genuine skill in the T20 game. The fashion for overs to take ever longer seemed to make no sense in an age of ever-speedier transport and communications. Teams were once well able to bowl 20 overs in an hour and 120 in a day. When England and Australia drew the first Test at Nottingham in 1938, they bowled 501.3 overs in four days – in other words, more than the 450 overs in five days that Test teams have to bowl in the 21 st century. Nor can later players use the excuse that they bowl more fast than spin. In June 1892, Lohmann and Lockwood of Surrey bowled unchanged to dismiss Middlesex for 75 in 36.2 overs in an hour and 40 minutes – a good 18 overs an hour. As late as 1984, county teams were told to bowl 117 overs in a day, or 18 an hour; thirty years later, their minimum was 96 a day, which still took fielding sides regularly past the proper close of 6.00 pm. Batting and Bowling