Lives in Cricket No 13 - AP Lucas

‘Sleepy Hollow’…Melbourne was easily the greatest manufacturing city in the colonies as well as the greatest commercial and financial centre. 49 Most went by boat but Lucas and three others travelled overland and ‘had some first rate kangaroo hunting on the way.’ On 17 and 18 February at Yarra Bend, the eleven amateurs played a two-day game against fifteen of the Bohemian Club. In the absence of Ulyett and Emmett, Lucas opened the bowling and finished with six for 83 in 37 five-ball overs. On the second day he scored 41 and took another wicket, but injured a hand in attempting a catch and apparently played no further part in the game. The Bohemians had seven men with first-class experience, so there was no real chance that a weak attack could take 28 wickets, and the match ended in a draw. Evidently Lucas’s injury was not too serious, for two days later he celebrated his 22nd birthday, playing tennis with the Moores at St Kilda. The next game started on 21 February against eleven of Victoria. Lucas made 38 out of 325 but the feature of the English innings was Blackham’s five stumpings, which included the last four wickets to fall. Four of them were off the debutant William Cooper, who also bowled Lucas for his first first-class wicket. Harris’s decision to open the bowling with Lucas rather than Ulyett was justified when the amateur took three for 43 in 43 overs, and he took two more in the second innings. At the end of the third day, Victoria needed 58 to win with three wickets to fall but the Englishmen were ‘beaten by two wickets owing to our bad fielding.’ After odds games against Bendigo and Ballarat, to which Lucas made no great contribution, the last game in Australia was another against Victoria. In the home team was Unaarrimin, known as Johnny Mullagh, a fierce advocate of Aboriginal rights, playing his sole first-class game. As a member of the famous Australian Aborigine team that toured England in 1868, he hit 1,698 runs at 23 and took 245 wickets at only 10 apiece. In the tourists’ first innings he caught Lucas for six, his only first-class catch. His 36 was the highest score in Victoria’s second innings, a ‘good display of patient, careful, and skilled batting’ that inspired the spectators to collect £50 for him, but his efforts were in vain. Needing only 54 to win, the Englishmen collapsed to 23 for four but Lucas and A.J.Webbe knocked off the runs despite ‘some slight misunderstanding … as to the time for drawing the stumps’, which meant that they had to come back for a few minutes in the morning. In the five first-class matches, Lucas came only fifth out of twelve in the batting averages, with a slightly disappointing 158 runs at 19.75. His greatest value on the tour was perhaps with the ball: he took 14 first-class wickets and, though full analyses for non-first-class matches are not 52 The Australian tour, 1878/79 49 Russell Ward, Australia Since the Coming of Man (Revised and illustrated version), Lansdowne Press, 1982, p 114. Previously published as Australia: A Short History , Ure Smith, 1965.