The Cricket Statistician No 195

33 skill to play the variety of shots needed on a “green top” or turning pitch, but ultimately wherever he could play back he would usually make runs. D’ Oliveira and Sobers were world-class players, Sobers arguably the best in the world, who both had the ability to play back consistently. The coaching advice to lesser players was usually to play forward to the moving ball to smother the movement. This note concentrates on the coach’s role in nurturing the ability and ambItions of the player concerned. In his biography of Gubby Allen: Gubby Allen: Man of Cricket, EW Swanton tells (p.37) of Allen’s relationship with George Hirst, when at age 17, Hirst was his coach at Eton. Plagued by a sore side Allen had decided he couldn’t go on with his bowling. Hirst said to him “he had heard this and knew what he was going through because he’d seen the pain in his face. You must obviously get your trouble right. But if you can, you’ve got certain things which I wish I’d had – a perfect rhythm and copy-book action, and you make the ball bustle off the ground. Very few people have both the rhythm and the pace off the pitch. If you go on with your bowling you might one day be a great fast bowler”. Allen persevered, therefore, and admitted that the talk with Hirst “made my cricket career” Hirst’s words arguably also created an England fast bowler. Derek Ufton and other footballing cricketers by Chris Overson D erek Ufton died at the end of March 2021, four days short of his 93 rd birthday. At the time he was England’s oldest living international footballer, having played once against a star-studded “Rest of Europe” in a 4-4 draw. On 21 December 1957 he had played in the famous Football League Second Division match when his side Charlton Athletic had come back from 5-1 down to beat Huddersfield Town 7-6. Or at least he had played for 17 minutes before being taken to hospital with a dislocated shoulder, leaving the home side to play with ten men (no substitutes in those days) and without their captain. As well as having a successful football career, Ufton was a first-cricketer playing 149 matches between 1949 and 1962, all but one of them for Kent, where he understudied England wicket-keeper Godfrey Evans. There were two other current first-class cricketers also playing at The Valley on that cold and wet December afternoon: in the Charlton side Kent’s Stuart Leary, and for Huddersfield Ken Taylor who had a successful career with Yorkshire and would play three times for England. In addition Charlton’s Fred Lucas had played twice for Kent in 1954. At the time there was not too much overlap between the two seasons and It was not unusual for gifted sportsmen to be able combine professional careers as both cricketers and footballers. Of the footballers appearing during the 1957/58 season there were 17 who were also current first-class cricketers (defined here as somebody who appeared in at least one of the English first-class seasons 1957 or 1958). These are listed below. The figures in brackets show first-class appearances in 1957 and 1958, and Football League appearances in 1957/58.