Cricket Witness No 3 - The Daffodil Blooms

116 “It crystallised Glamorgan’s psychological advantage and led to some further timid and uncertain batting. No batsman could seem to hit a ball hard enough to evade the grasping and grateful fingers of my team. Such moments of supreme confidence have a curious habit of achieving the miraculous.” 8 So it proved as his team responded by claiming six wickets in a dramatic final hour, and it took only a further half an hour the next morning for the Hampshire innings to be polished off with Len Muncer taking 5/25 and Johnnie 3/31. With Hampshire all out for 84, Wilf walked back into the amateurs’ room in the Bournemouth pavilion and asked his opposite number to bat again. Before going back out he also sent a telegram to the Somerset captain at Taunton saying: “Hang on to Yorkshire. We can win here!” 9 Allan would have dearly loved to received a telegram or message himself about events at Dean Park, but in the absence of this, the all- rounder had to keep up to date with progress from Bournemouth by purchasing a series of newspapers from the newsagents at Hither Green railway station, close to the home of his sister Millie where he was staying whilst receiving treatment on his injured shoulder. Each edition of the London Evening Standard and the Stop Press column was devoured with mounting excitement – “I never stopped buying papers from him”, he later recalled. 10 Back on the south coast, the weather gods were now smiling on Glamorgan as Hampshire followed-on with the Welsh county just A view of Bournemouth taken by a supporter at the Welsh county’s match againnst Hampshire in August 1948. Clinching the title