Lives in Cricket No 18 - FR Foster

In response to popular clamour, Lilley, Quaife and Field all made short speeches before the Earl of Warwick gave all the amateurs and Lilley gold cigarette cases, Lilley a gold watch-chain too, and Foster a fitted dressing case. The event was concluded with various further toasts. Guests, players and captain then wended their way to cab, train and bus. Perhaps things were never the same again, but one last reference to 1911. Frank Foster personally enjoyed the most marvellous season ever for a Warwicks allrounder. His figures – never since even approached – were in his eighteen championship matches: 1,383 runs at 44.61, with a highest score of 200, ten catches and 116 wickets at 19.15. In all Warwicks first-class matches, twenty of them, he scored 1,459 runs at 42.47 and took 124 wickets at 19.68. He played three other first-class matches, giving him grand totals of 1,614 runs in forty innings at 42.47; 12 catches; and 141 wickets at 20.31, off 952.5 six-ball overs. These are the bare bones. Figures do not convey the way he played; that for all scores over 50 he averaged more than a run a minute, that he captained a team regarded as ‘no hopers’ to the title, as the youngest-ever captain to take the Championship. Then there was the first 1,000 runs/100 wickets ‘double’ for Warwicks in a championship season. He repeated it in 1914. Since then only Tom Cartwright, in 1962, emulated the feat for Warwickshire with, in 27 championship matches, 1,082 runs and 101 wickets. Foster remained an all-round force until the war of course, yet one feels he reached his peak in 1911. The ‘Rosebud’ syndrome maybe? Tell Kent from me she hath lost 50