Cricket Witness No 5 - Whites on Green

132 “In those days, Glamorgan were not use to winning, and we slid from 127-5 to 166-8. There was no pressure on me, so I decided to enjoy myself and play my natural game. David Bairstow, had already kept chirping from behind the stumps ‘This one only plays by numbers, he’ll not last long’. But by the time Phil North, our last man, was at the wicket, I had gone past fifty, and when I got to 84, Phil played out a maiden over – to a massive round of applause from the crowd who were willing me on to get a hundred.” 1 It was not though a case of the nervous nineties for Maynard as, in the next over, he completed an audacious hundred. Having opted to play his natural game he unleashed some flowing drives on both sides of the wicket. But with fellow debutant Phil North who had been chosen for his abilities as a spinner rather than as a batsman at the other end, Maynard knew that he had to take every opportunity, and in true cavalier fashion, he duly breezed through to three figures with three sixes off successive balls from Carrick. As the teenager later reflected in his memoirs: “I knew that with no more wickets in hand, I was not going to get my century by pushing the ball around. The field was set so deep to offer me the single and get Phil on strike, and with virtually every fielder on the boundary, fours were hard to come by. Phil Carrick was bowling and I decided to hit him over the top. I came down the wicket to his second ball [of the over] and sent it over the sightscreen. It was premeditated. The next ball I did the same thing. I didn’t quite hit it right and it only just cleared long-on. I was hitting towards the pavilion, which is the slightly longer of the straight boundaries at St. Helen’s, but it was in Championship terms relatively short. Carrick was a wily bowler and I, a novice at 19, tried to read his mind. I decided that he would not expect me to come down the wicket a third time to him – so I did. The ball went a long way. I had become the youngest Glamorgan player to hit a century [in the Championship] and the first to do so on debut since Frank Pinch in 1921.” 2 Later that over his dream debut ended as he turned down the offer of a single into the covers off the fifth ball, before attempting to cut the last delivery through backward point. He proceeded to guide it straight into the hands of the fielder standing deep in the gully and departed for 102. Glamorgan had lost by 35 runs but Maynard walked off to a standing ovation from the admiring spectators, and soon afterwards, the champagne corks were popping in the Glamorgan changing room. As Maynard later admitted: “It was a strange feeling: everyone was cheering but we had lost a match. It took a while for what I had achieved to sink in and much was made of my hitting three consecutive sixes to reach the three-figure mark. I had hit five in all, plus thirteen fours in a 98-ball innings and what was important to me was that, despite the fact it was my first Championship knock, I had played my natural game. Rapid hundreds, remarkable debuts and great run outs