The Summer Field

139 Yorkshire at Clifton College, George Ulyett was ‘magnificently caught’ by G.F.Grace at long on off WG. ‘The catch was loudly cheered and it deserved to be for the fieldsman ran sideways for several yards and made a one- handed catch of the ball which had been hit hard,’ the Western Daily Press reported. And in 1857 at Burton-on-Trent, when the first eleven played ‘the young uns of the 22’ to mark the laying of the first brick of a new pavilion, Lord Stanhope made a ‘fine catch’: The ball was hit over his head down the wind; he turned around and ran after it at full speed and so rapid was his pace that after catching the ball he had to run from ten to 15 yards before he could stop himself. At best, alert fielders as a team could, as the Sheffield Independent wrote of Dalton against Sheffield in September 1852, ‘form a charmed circle beyond which the ball could not pass’. Any batsman was less alert than such fielders at his peril. In July 1857 at Torquay, Mr Patch was bowling when ‘suddenly changing the action’, he ran out a ‘promising young player from Cheltenham College’ who had been ‘backing up too eagerly’, the Torquay Directory reported. In a July 1936 article, George Geary urged a fielder, wherever he stood, to imagine that every ball was coming his way. As in batting and bowling, the most gifted fielders seemed able to anticipate the near future: they spotted something about to happen that matched an experience stored in their head, and – more to the point – acted on it in time. In October 2013, hailing his former Middlesex teammate Paul Downton as the new managing director of the England and Wales Cricket Board, Simon Hughes recalled the wicketkeeper as ‘an excellent reader of the game’: He could tell from something in my run-up (of which I was completely oblivious) that I was going to bowl a slower ball and would take a couple of steps towards the stumps as I delivered, occasionally pulling off a catch which would not have carried to other keepers. It was in the interests of all – captains, bowlers, supporters – that their fielders denied runs and helped to take wickets. And yet, as the outstanding fielder Derek Randall put it in his 1980 book The Young Player’s Guide , most cricketers used almost to see fielding as a ‘necessary chore’ and the worst fielder ‘was simply banished to the outfield’. Or, as WG admitted, he banished himself. This widespread belief that fielding became better in the modern game gratified the players who had to take more pains over fielding, as Randall said, to meet a higher threshold of skill. It was easy to find evidence, at all standards, of past failings. The Torquay Times in July 1894 deplored the Torquay club’s ‘wretched’ fielding against Plainmoor Victorians. That implied observers had a norm of fielding in mind – in this case, that fielders should hold catches (‘chance after chance being thrown away’). Such sloppy fielding may have been an echo of a careless attitude towards playing generally; the match began at 2.55pm, but should have started at 2pm. County matches, too, saw mixed fielding; that same Gloucestershire-Yorkshire match at Bristol in 1875 saw ‘three or four easy chances’ from W.G.Grace’s bowling not taken in the second innings alone. Fielding and Wicketkeeping