Lives in Cricket No 15 - Michael Falcon

The Varsity Match started well, despite Falcon losing the toss, but soon fortunes turned. The fast but erratic Alexander Cowie dismissed two batsmen in the first over and Oxford were soon 30 for four. At this point Philip Le Couteur came in to join Charles Hooman in a century stand. After the latter was dismissed for 61, Le Couteur totally dominated proceedings. He went on to make 160 out of 315 and then took six for 20 and five for 46 with his leg-spinners on a helpfully wet pitch as Cambridge went down by an innings. The Times made scathing remarks about Cambridge’s bowling and fielding, but the truth is they were beaten by a virtuoso one-man performance unique in the history of Cambridge v Oxford contests: no-one else has done the match-double of a century and ten wickets. 8 What was supposed to be the climax of his University cricket career was thus a sad disappointment for Michael Falcon. In contrast to 1909, Falcon (who had dropped to fifth place in the Cambridge batting list with an average of 22.86) turned out no fewer than nine times for title-winning Norfolk in the 1910 Minor Counties season, which culminated in the Challenge Match against Berkshire. He was so enthusiastic to play for Norfolk that, finding himself touring Ireland with Cambridge University and short of time, he crossed the Irish Sea overnight and travelled cross-country in the small hours of the morning in order to turn out against Bedfordshire. The season was dominated by the performances of Norfolk’s veteran skipper Rev George Raikes, whose main claim to sporting fame was that he played as England’s goalkeeper at association football. Raikes played in eight games, winning seven outright and achieving a first-innings lead in the drawn game. He scored 679 runs at 61.72 and took 57 wickets at 10.66: in every match in which he played he had a significant impact on the result, even in the Challenge Match in which Geoffrey Stevens’ innings of 201 has tended to obscure all other contributions. Falcon had modest success with the bat, scoring just over 300 runs with three fifties, but the remarkable feature of his season was his sudden reappearance as a strike bowler. 22 Varsity Days 8 Philip Le Couteur was a Rhodes Scholar from Australia whose first-class career was almost entirely limited to his three years at Oxford (1909-1911). He was considered promising enough to represent the Gentlemen six times and, at The Oval in 1911, his bowling was largely responsible for the Gentlemen achieving a rare win. He returned to Australia, but played only three games for Victoria before dropping out of first-class cricket. He became a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Western Australia, where he still holds several all-rounders’ records.