Lives in Cricket No 13 - AP Lucas

discovered behind the pavilion with a paper and pencil trying to do a long division sum.’ Amateurs often showed some disdain for averages, so the comment may reflect mild, if amused, disapproval. When interviewed for Chats on the Cricket Field in 1893, Lucas was rather vague about the details of some matches he played in, but knew exactly how many runs he had scored. It was perhaps Lucas’s very orthodoxy that left him in the ranks of the very good rather than the truly great batsmen. He was better at saving matches than winning them, an unusual role for an amateur: by 1883, he had carried his bat three times in first-class matches, none of them in a winning cause. In 1899 ‘Historicus’, writing in Harmsworth Magazine commented: ‘In his youthful days his cricket, though it delighted the expert, was rather too slow to suit the tastes of the unscientific spectator’. 77 Herbert Gibson in The Doings summarised his outstanding 1881 season for the Rovers thus: ‘In getting all those runs he displayed all his well-known patience, his defence was superb and he punished any loose bowling with great vigour.’ When playing for the Rovers, he knew that even if he received a few good balls there would be a bad one along before too long, so his patient defence was enough. At the very highest level, as in The Ashes match, he lacked the flair to break the shackles of relentlessly accurate bowling. For the Rovers he averaged 40 and for Essex pre-first-class 35, but in first-class cricket a relatively low 26. The bowler Lucas’s bowling was generally described as slow round-arm. It apparently did not spin much so seemed innocuous, but it was probably very accurate and achieved a degree of bounce. The number of victims he had caught and bowled suggests that he employed clever changes of flight and pace. Early in his career, the extent to which Lucas bowled depended largely on his team’s bowling resources. At school he bowled more in 1874, after Patterson and Schultz had left. When he joined them at Cambridge, he initially bowled little but in his last two years there became a useful change bowler. With the Uppingham Rovers, as for any predominantly amateur side, bowlers were always less plentiful than batsmen, and also opposing batsmen were not as strong as in first-class cricket. Lucas often opened their bowling and remains their third highest wicket-taker. Early in his Rovers career he was described as bowling ‘loblollies’ and ‘in the style called “Cock-a-doodle-do”’. These may be Rovers slang for over-arm lobs, which he definitely bowled later, and for donkey-drops of the sort that so spectacularly deceived Conan Doyle. H.H.Stephenson was an advocate of lobs and may have encouraged Lucas to bowl them. The man and the cricketer 83 77 Quoted in Allen, David Rayvern (ed), Cricket’s Silver Lining, 1864-1914 , Guild Publishing, 1987, p 383.