The Summer Field

138 Chapter Sixteen Fielding and Wicketkeeping ‘To every cricketer except the slow thinker and the ponderous runner, fielding is – or should be – jolly good fun.’ F.N.S.Creek, Teach Yourself Cricket (1958 edition) W.G.Grace used to prefer fielding at long leg, ‘but I much prefer point now,’ he told The Strand Magazine in 1895. ‘Eighteen stone, for that is what I have weighed for a good many years past, is quite enough for me to carry when batting, and I can tell you I don’t care for sprinting to the boundary in the attempt to save a four as much as I did in my younger days.’ If the greatest cricketer of his day could so frankly shirk fielding, others could copy. In a 1908 article Albert Knight noted: ‘I never yet saw a batsman really tired of run getting or a bowler lazy when getting wickets. Fielding however, even by school boys or by local Saturday afternoon players who have spent the better part of the week in an office or factory, is thought as fagging, as a hard drudgery which is best avoided.’ Of the three field skills, fielding usually came third; Grace in 1895, like most when interviewed, had more to say about batting or bowling than fielding. Yet Knight and others understood that good fielding could make all the difference. As the Derby Mercury put it in July 1876, when South Derbyshire lost to Repton, ‘when men will neither field the ball nor hold a catch they must not be surprised at being beaten’. Once the batsman stepped onto the field or the bowler stood at his mark with the ball, they were on their own. Fielders by contrast were an influence on every other part of the game. Captains could move fielders. The Sheffield and Rotherham Independent in August 1839 praised the Sheffield captain Vincent, who ‘displayed great judgement in placing Sampson where he did to catch Squires’: He, having observed Squires played forward and sometimes hit the ball up though considerably short of the ordinary mid-wicket man, brought Sampson, who fielded that place, a great deal nearer about 12 yards in front of the latter and the consequence was that Squires in his very next hit put the ball into Sampson’s hands. Batsmen did well to beware of good fielders, and wicketkeepers such as Charley Brown, playing for Bretby at LordChesterfield’s estate inDerbyshire in 1858. The visiting Burton-on-Trent eleven ‘had too much dread of his prowess to give him a single chance of stumping them out’. Watchers, including those reporting for the press, evidently appreciated clever field placing and athletic fielding. In August 1875 when Gloucestershire hosted