Lives in Cricket No 1 - Allan Watkins

Australian captain, Don Bradman later naming him as one of the most promising young players he had seen on the trip. Rain was now threatening to shape the destiny of the Championship, but Glamorgan managed one crucial victory: between damp draws with Gloucestershire and Middlesex, they bowled out Somerset at Weston for 96 to win by eight runs. Four for 27 in the Gloucestershire match at Ebbw Vale brought Allan’s tally of wickets to 35 at 28.23 each. With the bat he was still failing to re-capture his best form of 1947, averaging 26.71, with only three fifties to accompany his early season century. His value to any team was crucially boosted by a growing reputation as one of the most prehensile close fielders in the land, but with bat and ball he was still making his way to journeyman status on the county circuit. So when the selectors met to pick their team for the fifth Test at The Oval, with England already trailing by three matches to none, most followers would have agreed with the cricket correspondent of The Times , when he wrote that ‘the choice of Watkins may cause some surprise.’ “I nearly fell through the floor when I heard. It was Wilf who told me. Then we heard it over the wireless – there was no television – and Molly couldn’t believe it. I knew, but I didn’t say much about it. I said, ‘I think I might be playing.’” Adding to the public incredulity, and to Allan’s own astonishment, was the news that he would open the bowling. “Why I came to be an opening bowler, I haven’t a clue. I wasn’t an opening bowler for Glamorgan.” Allan’s selection, at the age of 26, answered the call for youth and, if Glamorgan’s domestic success was to be rewarded, there were few other candidates for the honour of a Test cap – Len Muncer perhaps, the first bowler to take a hundred wickets in the season, or Willie Jones, who had enjoyed a purple patch with two double hundreds in June, or skipper Wooller, who had to turn down the vice-captaincy of MCC that winter, but the Welsh county was proud to call itself a side of few stars. Allan believes that his good friend John Arlott, keen to see the selectors looking further afield, had helped to press his cause, but perhaps more pertinent was the presence on the selection panel of the Glamorgan secretary and Allan’s former skipper, John Clay. It was a red letter day for South Wales. ‘They will be toasting Allan Watkins, the Glamorgan left-hander, in the picturesque, oak-beamed inns and taverns in and around rural Usk tonight,’ 38 Called Up For England