Lives in Cricket No 17 - Fuller Pilch

Chapter Three Batting evolution In the days when only under-arm bowling was lawful, batsmen had usually remained standing up straight at their crease, legs apart and bat raised, while waiting for the ball to come towards them, giving them time to select an appropriate stroke. One of the most admired strokes was called the ‘draw’, when, if the batsman was sure that the ball was shooting flat and straight along the ground he would watch it go past his front leg and then glance the ball between his legs to the on-side. Some bolder batsmen would even lift the front leg as high as possible to make it easier to swing the bat and strike the ball past square leg. Not as spectacular as a ‘Dilshan Dilscoop’ perhaps, or even Kevin Pietersen’s ‘flamingo’, but it shows that Georgian batsmen were as inventive as their twenty-first century T20 counterparts. The speed and bounce of good-length round-arm deliveries eliminated the ‘draw’ and many other previously successful strokes from the batsman’s repertoire as it invariably trapped the batsman flat-footed in front of the stumps with little or no time to prepare any sort of effective response. Fuller Pilch had the answer. Just over six feet tall, with long legs and arms, he would stretch as far forward as possible from an upright stance to meet the ball with his bat just after it landed and before it could bounce higher or shoot. This became famous as ‘Pilch’s poke’ but Frederick Gale insisted that it was much more than that because the stroke could bring runs while Fuller was ‘smothering the ball before it has time to rise and break, and placing it to the ‘off’ or the ‘on‘, with the greatest apparent ease.’ Fuller developed his forward play even further and was able to place less accurate bowling through the field on the offside with the earliest form of the classic cover-drive, described by Gale in The Game of Cricket thus: ‘I hardly ever saw him let off an off-ball which was wide of the wicket, and he had a tremendous hit in front of point, between middle and cover, which gained him many a four or five runs.’ The finest exponent of round-arm bowling, often round the wicket, throughout much of Fuller’s career was William Lillywhite and they were involved in many duels over the years. The Bury and Norwich Post reported: Pilch, with his long forward reach, would stretch forward and meet Lillywhite’s balls at the pitch and wither lay them dead under his bat or drive them a little back according to the length and his power to command them. Lillywhite, with change of pace and elevation, would diminish or increase the length inch by inch until Pilch was in doubt whether to play forward or back, in the latter case having the least 14