Lives in Cricket No 19 - Frank Sugg

club though his cricket base, so to speak, remained the Pitsmoor club. Among other clubs for which Frank appeared (as reported in local newspapers) were Wednesday, Heeley, Mount Tabor, Cosmopolitans, Shrewsbury, and Law Students. On the strength of his connections with the legal profession, Frank also appeared for the Judicature Cricket Club in prestigious matches at Bramall Lane, as did his brother Walter. Indeed, Walter scored his first century in one of these matches. Although batting was Frank’s forte, he also often kept wicket. If this seems an unlikely position for so tall a man, Frank had great agility, a good eye and a safe pair of hands. He was also fearless, an invaluable attribute when wickets were often fiery and wicketkeepers’ protective equipment minimal. It might be thought that Frank would have been an effective bowler. After all, he was strong and able to throw a cricket ball prodigious distances. In fact, as already noted, Frank had been marked as a promising bowler while still at school, but ‘I used to bowl in the style which seems to be common to girls and when I tried to throw in I used precisely the same action.’ Because his throwing brought him much ridicule, he determined, at the age of fourteen, to learn to throw properly. After much effort and practice, he succeeded in this quest but only at the price of losing his bowling action. Subsequently when called upon to bowl, whether in club or first-class cricket, Frank relied on slow lobs. 24 In one match, for Sheffield against Birmingham, he is credited with taking eight wickets for 14 runs, and thereafter any decent ball he delivered was called a ‘Birmingham’ ball. 25 Not that there were to be many of these in first-class cricket. In a first-class career extending over 17 seasons, Frank Sugg was to take only ten wickets. In 1882 Frank was invited to play for Hull Town Cricket Club. This marked the commencement of his career as a professional cricketer. While quite a journey from his Sheffield home, Frank would have relished the chance to widen his horizons and broaden Sporting Beginnings 23 24 Information from the profile of Frank Sugg in Cricket , 23 April 1896. Gerald Brodribb’s 1997 book on lob bowlers, The Lost Art , published by Boundary Books, lists Sugg as a lob practitioner, but gives no further details. Lob bowlers were far from extinct in Sugg’s time as a first-class player: indeed Walter Humphreys, bowling underarm, took 122 championship wickets for Sussex in the 1893 season. It might be added that as a batsman Sugg was particularly severe on lob bowlers, perhaps because he understood their wiles. He once hit Dr E.M.Grace for fourteen successive fours and Humphreys did not escape severe punishment on occasions. 25 Joseph Stoddart, Men I have Met , J.Heywood, 1889, p 61.