Lives in Cricket No 16 - Joe Hardstaff

One is left wondering about the captaincy of Gubby Allen, whose intense style of leadership was obviously very different from the relaxed approach of Errol Holmes a year earlier. From Brian Rendell’s Gubby Under Pressure it seems that Allen might have been too much of a disciplinarian with the young professionals in his team. Certainly his letters home are fairly disparaging. On 22 November he wrote to Pelham Warner complaining that ‘this team have not a great deal of cricket brain’. He went on to wish that he had someone with him, like Pelham Warner, with a cricket brain, who could help Hardstaff, Fishlock, Farnes, Fagg, Sims and Copson: ‘in fact all the new-comers who look like children’. Perhaps Allen was already beginning to doubt whether he could regain the Ashes and was preparing the ground in anticipation of failure. After the second day of the Fifth Test (Australia having scored 593 for nine) Allen wrote in a letter to his father, ‘Actually I think we are a rotten side and cannot think how we ever won a single match. The following list of complete failures speaks for itself – Robins, Worthington, Fagg, Fishlock, Sims, Wyatt (through injury) and Hardstaff (in Tests). Never have there been so many flops in one side.’ Certainly as far as performances went there was some truth in this very damning statement, but it is surely the job of any captain to get the best out of his players. It cannot have been easy for these young professionals if they sensed that their amateur captain had little confidence in them. In Joe’s case he was under orders and left in no doubt. As the tour progressed, Allen seems to have become somewhat detached from his team. We shall never know just how the team felt about him but one has long had the feeling that the tour as a whole was not as happy as it might have been. In the end, Joe resolved his technical problems and the runs began to flow once more. Nor did he see very much of Allen again until the ill-fated West Indian tour of 1947/48. It is interesting that of the eight players chosen for their batting only three – Hammond, Barnett and Joe – were selected for the First Test against New Zealand at Lord’s the following June. Worthington never played Test cricket again, Leyland’s solitary (and final) Test was at The Oval against Australia in 1938, and Fishlock did not appear again until after the war. Fagg was a different case: his illness caused him to miss the whole of the 1937 season, but he was amongst those selected for The Oval Test in 1938, declined the trip to South Africa in 1938/39 on the grounds of health, and finally reappeared against the West Indies in 1939. 62 Australian Test Tour, 1936/37