The Summer Field

92 Australia to save money. The same pattern applied around the tour years of 1930 and 1934; Gloucestershire scraped along between the years of Australian visiting windfalls. Yorkshire, a richer, metropolitan Test-hosting county, enjoyed record takings of £4447 at Sheffield against Australia in 1938 and according to its 1939 yearbook ‘the finances were also greatly helped’ by the Test proceeds ‘and an increase in members’ subscriptions’. That Australia were so hard to beat, and kept the English game from bankruptcy, it was no wonder the English tried to understand the Australians’ success and appeal. * Given the personal contacts, by players, journalists accompanying tours and enthusiasts alike, besides the usual know-alls, there was no shortage of views. Cardus quickly and characteristically used his first experience of Australia in 1936-7 as a stick to beat pros’ with. In The Field in May 1937 he praised Sydney’s Saturday afternoon grade cricket and, like others, pointed out that a country ‘with a population smaller than that of Lancashire’ kept finding players to challenge England’s best, ‘and our best is provided by an elaborate professional organisation, almost a trade union’. Some English players on tour did note that, in country games, men who never rose even to play for their state could prove a handful. Quite how well grade cricket equipped Australians, technically and psychologically, was most obvious in the Victory Tests in 1945, when an Australian Services team without Test experience apart from captain Lindsay Hassett held England in a five-Test series. After the drawn fourth Test at Lord’s, England captain Wally Hammond, in a syndicated column, described how his men did their best on the third and final day to force a win:’But we found Miller and Stanford bat in the stubborn way which Australians have when they have their backs to the wall, defying us to do their worst.’ Keith Miller admittedly became one of the game’s greatest all-rounders; Ross Stanford was a product of Adelaide grade cricket whose only pre-war appearance for South Australia as a nervous teenager resulted in a run-out by Don Bradman for no score. It was, as the South African who settled in England as a coach and journalist, Aubrey Faulkner, said, quoted by Cardus in August 1937, ‘that the difference between most English cricketers and Dominions was that Test matches seemed to take away from the average English players and brought out the best of the overseas’. Visitors did take inspiration from historic grounds such as Lord’s; Stanford said as much in my book The Victory Tests . Yet did that explain why Australians excelled in England? Was the English six-day professional cricket week to blame, as the anonymous amateur wondered in the Southern Daily Echo in 1951. Weekend players such as Ross Stanford kept their zest and relished the Lord’s occasion; only, why did Australians do so much better than South Africans, New Zealanders and West Indians? Was the average young Australian player ‘streets ahead’ of his English counterpart thanks to the humble concrete wicket, ‘in my humble opinion’, wrote Walter Robins