Lives in Cricket No 12 - Ric Charlesworth

latter’s preferences to go on tours or stay at home, Charlesworth had left first-class cricket. But before he did so he had one last half-season for Western Australia. * * * * * The 1979/80 season opened with a new format. All the matches in the one-day competition (re-launched as the McDonald’s Cup) took place in November. In a team now captained by Marsh, and including Lillee, Laird and Malone also back fromWSC, Ric played a modest role. His highest score in four matches, was 32 (run out) in the first, a victory in Adelaide. Batting down the order he only had chance to make six not out in a six-wicket defeat of Victoria at the WACA ground, after Hughes had made 58 and South African recruit Ken McEwan 99. Following an inglorious 118-run loss to New South Wales at the SCG, Western Australia defeated Tasmania in a play-off for third place at the same venue. While Marsh made 69 and Laird 62, Ric was again run out, for one. Given the helter-skelter nature of the format, not too much should be made of the fact that he was run out five times in a total of eleven innings in the one-day game throughout his career. Certainly it was a record that evidently didn’t trouble the state selectors, who again appointed him captain for the first Shield matches, coinciding with the start of the Test series against England, in which Laird, Marsh and Lillee joined Hughes in the Australian team after their return from WSC. He scored ten and 39, opening the batting in a match won by Victoria; and 46 at number six, his only innings in a draw against New South Wales at the WACA ground. Those two pre-Christmas matches as captain proved to be the end of his playing career in first-class cricket. He’d had 82 innings, five of them not out, in 47 matches at an average of 30.22. Thirty years later he was too modest to put much emphasis on the contribution he’d made by brilliant fielding, something not assessed numerically at that time, mostly in the covers and even on the boundary. His speed, catching and throwing were exceptional, recalled veteran state selector and WACA vice-president Allan Edwards, who rated him among Western Australia’s three or four best in the whole of the state’s first-class history from 1947/48 to 2009. Other contenders were Ross Edwards, perhaps owing similar qualities in the covers to a similar background in hockey and a 44 1976-1981