Cricket 1888

NOV. 29, 1888. CEICKET 2 A WEEKLY RECORD OF THE GAME, 453 TOO N E A R N O T T IN GH AM . B y “ L e a t h e r h u n t e r .” Reprinted from Fores' “ Sporting Notes and Sketches" for April. O ne evening at “ The Uplands,” not far from Whissendine, our host, Fred Allen, Willie Poles, Joe Henton, the steeplechase rider, and yours truly, were smoking, and, pour passer le temps , wishing the aforesaid “ Up­ lands” contained a billiard-room. “ Tell us that tale, L------, about Goadby— that one you were going to give us when you were stopped by the arrival of the post,” said Poles. “ I second that,” cries A llen; “ the Goadby yarn by all means.” “ Well, I’ll tell you the yarn, as you call i t ; but I give you fair warning it has nothing to do with the Gorge, nor yet with theBullimore : in fact, it's ‘ Flannell ’ not ‘ Scarlet.’ ” “ Fire away, then; anything’s better than nothing.” “ You remember the year there was a split in the Nottingham team, when seven of the eleven went under canvas on ‘ the Sacred Hill.’ It happened that year that round about Goadby there were a lot of good second-rate cricketers, more especially when the ‘ long ’ was on. Parson Hutton had three boys at Cambridge in the Jesus eleven; then there were Hartley and Denton from Exeter College, Oxford; a curate at Stathern, who had played for Cambridge at Lord’s ; with others of less note, including myself. _So as Hartley, Denton, and I were staying at Goadby Lodge with your brother Hinton, it struck someone among us that we could get up a team, and call it ‘ Goadby C.C.,’ and win a lot of laurels in what Jorrocks would have called ‘ the minor fields ’ of cricket­ ing enterprise. “ Having secured ahout thirteen players, we made old Tom Rowbotham (a thoroughbred Goadby man) captain. Tom was not half a bad man for the post, and if he rarely made runs he bothered the bowlers, and made them lose their tempers by ‘ keeping his wood in the hole,’ as he termed it. “ The season was getting advanced before we had completed our arrangements, and we chose two or three weak villages to experiment upon until our ’Varsity bats could turn up. These went off all right, and then we went in for ‘ Kudos.’ Oh, what jolly long innings we used to .have ! the ‘ uncertainty of cricket ’ didn’t seem to apply in our case. Victory was added to victory, till the Grantham Journal got into a way of announcing our matches as resulting, ‘ as usual,’ in favour of the ‘ powerful Goadby team ; ’ or they would say, ‘ as anticipated, the Goadby eleven proved far too strong for the home team.’ A good deal of discussion used to take place among the farmers and others at the ‘ George ’ at Melton, on Tuesdays, as to whether there had ever been as good a local team as ours since cricket first came into Leicestershire. One Tuesday, when I was smoking the usual after- dinner weed at the above hotel with Harry Swiper, of Langar, the subject came to the fore again. Harry said he had heard a good deal about us, and should like to arrange a match between us and the Langar eleven for a dinner, if we had any vacant dates. “ I said we could give him Thursday that same week, or the following Monday, or— “ ‘ Oh, Monday will do,’ he broke in, as I was about to refer to my card of fixtures ; so we engaged to play at Langar on the Monday. “ ‘ W ill you back Goadby, Leatherhuntor?’ cried Joe Wildes. “ ‘ Yes.’ “ ‘ What odds ? Langar’s only a small village.’ “ Although feeling sure of winning, I thought it would look rather conceited to give Joseph the odds, therefore replied, ‘ So is Goadby.’ ‘ ‘ 4Well, suppose we have it this way. I will bet my share of next Tuesday’s wine bill against yours that you don’t beat them.’ “ ‘ Very well,’ I replied ; ‘ that’s giving you the advantage of a possible “ draw :” but I’ll take you.’ “ We had at Goadby Lodge an old shepherd named Huddlestone, who had come out of the Vale of Belvoir, and had been in his time a fair cricketer, for a member of a village team, and this old boy did not at all sympathise with our triumphs, for the reason that, in his playing days, it was rarely that an outsider was introduced into a local team. Now , as you all know, nobody cares to inquire whether their opponents are all genuine inhabitants of the rival town or village; and if they do find out a few who have been brought to strengthen the eleven for that day, nothing is said beyond a little chaffing, a serious objection on such a score being voted ‘ paltry.’ Old Huddlestone used to insist, however, that we wore false colours; a scratch team, he maintained, ought to call itself a scratch team. No doubt he was right, but we shouldn’t have got so many matches ‘ on ’ without the two magic names ‘ Goadby ’ and ‘Rowbotham; ’ and so I told the old shepherd. “ ‘ A ye! I know, Mr. L—. It’s all very well, but I’m a waitin’ : yo’ll git a hidin’ yit afore yo’ve done!’ ‘ “ Of course I used to chaff him sometimes, after we had returned from another success, and enquire when he was going to have his prophecy fulfilled, and he would answer, ‘ By- and-by; yo’ve not got into the right quarter yit.’ “ The Monday came, and with it our brake and pair; so, after ‘ wetting our whistles,’ and giving young Charley Hutton ‘ an extra ’ be­ cause he was to blow the horn, which was about aslong as himself, we started for Langar. You know what a lovely drive it is ; and I think there is no time in all the year when the Vale of Belvoir is so charming as when the clouds, late in summer or early in autumn, cast tlieir shadows in great moving patches, obscuring some villages and leaving other3 plainly discernible in the full light of the glorious sunshine—making the whole wide expanse like the moving scenes in a diorama.” “ Oh, all right! ” interrupted Poles; “ we’ll suppose all that, L—. Get on to the match.” “ Very well! I’ll touch up the horses, if you wish, but I mean to say the agreeable sur­ roundings had a desirable effect on our spirits, so that if we had not felt ‘cock sure’ of success before, we certainly felt ‘ winning all over ’ by the time we got to Langar. “ The match was to commence at eleven, and we were ‘ to tim e; ’ Rowbotham and the Langar captain were introduced to each other, and no time was lost in ‘ spinning up.’ As their man was a local farmer, like the Goadby captain, the introduction was scarcely required, for Harry Sedgebrook was known throughout ‘ The Vale; ’ and, indeed, all over the Belvoir Estate. “ ‘ You call, Rowbotham.* “ ‘ Heads.’ “ ‘ It’s a tail; we’ll go in.’ “ *Best thing they could do,’ says Charles Hutton, ‘ from what I can see of them, if they want an innings at all. Eh, L ------? ’ “ They certainly did not appear to be a very formidable lot to tackle; three or four of them played in braces, and flannels were conspicuous by their absence, while our fellows were, of course, got up in the most orthodox style. “ We were soon in the field, and Rowland Hutton and Reggie Denton had the bowling entrusted to them, with instructions to settle the lot before lunch so as to avoid a draw. Two batsmen, both wearing braces, faced the bowling, which was very good, both Hutton and Denton being ‘ in form,’ and during the first two or three overs little was done in the way of scoring. But there were two things I did not like : one was the ease with which they played our best deliveries, looking as though they only treated them with respect from the habit of *getting well set’ before trying to put on the runs ; the other was the extreme neat­ ness of wrist-play the younger batsman dis­ played in ‘ tapping’ a ball. It struck me that I had seen the man bat somewnere before; but after puzzling my memory through several overs, and misfielding a ball at ‘ cover ’ through being abstracted, I dismissed the idea, pulled myself together, and had the satisfaction of saving several ‘twos,’ for which I received some applause. “ * Twenty for no wicket’ called for a ‘change,’ and Hartley (left hand fast) took the ball. There was a lull in the scoring for about three overs, and then we resumed leatherhunting at the old pace; which pace quickly increased, most of the runs coming from the new bowler; and Rowbotham deemed it necessary to hold a brief council of war. ‘“ The beggars have got their eye in ; the ball looks the size of your hat to them now ! ’ said Rowland Hutton. ‘It’s no use trusting to pace till they’re parted; we want the biggest change we can get. ’ “ ‘ Go on with your “ underhand,” Row­ botham,’ I suggested ; ‘ there’s no more decided change from what we’ve given them than that.’ “ Well, Tom went on with his ‘daisy-cutters’ —we had nothing besides, in fact, until lunch at two o’clock; and I believe it succeeded better than anything else would have done, for the neat trapper who had caused me so much anxiety treated them with more respect, and evidently felt less at home with them than with the more brilliant deliveries of our regular bowlers. He seemed, like John Gilpin’s steed, to wonder ‘what thing upon his back he’d got;’ but the desired parting was none the more effected for that, and the verdict read 110 for no wicket when we tumbled into the luncheon tent. “ Rowbotham, as the captain of the visitors, took the ohair, and Sedgebrook sat on his right, the landlord carving at the opposite end. This was pre-arranged, as Sedgebrook com­ bined business with pleasure by’getting inform­ ation from the captain of the opposing team on such occasions with a view to securing orders for the hire of reaping and thrashing- machines in the parish the latter hailed from. I sat next, and heard what passed :— “ ‘ You seem to have a good many new folks your way, T om ; I shall hardly know a soul when the cutting begins, if I ’m lucky enough to get any orders.’ “ ‘ Oh, you mean the parson’s boys and Mr. Leatherhunter, your right-hand neighbour there. No, they’re not in your line, Harry. You won’t find much change at Goadby—only old Barker’s dead and I’m managing for the widow as one of the trustees, so that won’t make any difference. I wish it were as straight sailing over this blessed match; that man you call ‘ Cock,’ or ‘ Cocks,’ seems no end of a stayer.’ “ ‘ Yes, Cock is a very neat player; but, bless you! there’s generally a ‘ rot * sets in after these long stands, especially in a village team ; we’ve an awful tail” “ ‘ I’m too old a cricketer to mind a licking, and we haven’t had one this year so far; but I didn’t want it to-day.' replied Rowbotham. “ ‘ W h y ?’ “ ‘ You know Hinton, at the Lodge ? ’ “ ‘ Of course. ’ “ ‘ He’s got a conceited, cantankerous old shepherd named Huddlestone, who seems to delight in running down our team. This morning, when he met me riding up on my pony to join the party, he ask me where wo were going, and when I told him he said, “ Ah, Langar I that’ll d o ; yo’ll git a hidin’ to-day. I’ve bin a-waitin’ : I alius said as if iver yo got over Harby bridge yo’d catch it! ” And, con­ found it ! ’ continued Rowbotham, *we seem likely to bring the old fool’s words true. There’ll be no holding him after this ! ’ “ ‘ Oh, never say die! Try this celery, then have another go at Cock; he won’t see quite so clearly, perhaps, after lunch: he’s rather a thirsty soul.’ “ Well, at it we went again, the variation in the play being that Mr. Cock ‘ opened his shoulders ’ with less provocation, and we were saved the trouble of fielding pretty often by the ball going clean out of the field and being thrown back by the onlookers. *Go it, Cock !’ ‘ Good old Cock! ’ and so forth, from the Langar folks, didn’t tend to improve our bowl­ ing: in fact, our trundlers wore shortly demoralised: they seemed to think that what­ ever they bowled it would lgo.’ You know what I mean ? ” “ Of course ; but how was the other fellow going on ? Couldn’t you move him ? ” NEXT ISSUE, DECEMBER 27.