Lives in Cricket No 23 - Brief Candles

16 Aubrey Smith and vice-captain Monty Bowden. Basil Grieve had shown ability as an allrounder throughout the tour and so was a natural tenth pick, leaving the eleventh place between Charles Coventry and McMaster. As the former was currently in better batting form – his last four innings had been 9, 1, 18* and 10, against Emile’s 17, 4, 1 and 0 – and had also had some success with the ball during the tour, it was fair enough that he got the nod. Five of the selected eleven – Abel, Ulyett, Read, Briggs and Wood – had already played for England against Australia, and were thus of bona fide Test standard, but the others had not and were not; and they never did, and never were. But this unrepresentative ‘England’ side – though not so named at the time – still won easily, beating ‘South Africa’ by eight wickets in mid-afternoon on the second day. There followed another odds game in Kimberley (McMaster 0), succeeded in turn by the second representative game at Cape Town. Unfortunately Aubrey Smith had gone down with a fever immediately after the First Test, and was not able to travel to Kimberley. Although he had recovered in time to have played in the final game, he could not get to Cape Town before the match was due to start. So there was a gap in the ‘England’ side – and Emile McMaster was the only member of the touring party available to fill it. Thus it was that, on Monday, 25 March 1889, the man from County Down took his place as one of the ‘England’ eleven in South Africa’s second Test Match. 20 There was surely no fanfare to mark the occasion; the suggestion in one recent article that ‘he was given his cap by the young England skipper, Monty Bowden’ is simply ludicrous. 21 At the time it was just another tour match, albeit a specially important one; it was more than ten years before it gradually began to slip into the canon of Test matches, and so the suggestion that McMaster was formally ‘capped’ is nonsense. And in any case, the practice of Test debutants being physically presented with a cap by their captain just before the start of their first game is of very considerably more recent origin. Ah well. The match itself took a predictable course. Bobby Abel (120) held firm in an ‘England’ total of 292, only Wood (59) otherwise getting beyond the twenties. Emile McMaster’s entry into history came when Abel was dismissed with the score at 287 for seven, and he joined Grieve at the crease. The bowler was left-arm medium-pacer Gobo Ashley, also playing in his first and only Test. Abel had been his fourth wicket, and immediately McMaster became his fifth, caught at slip by Albert Rose-Innes off his first ball: ‘smartly caught’ according to Cox , but otherwise we know nothing of McMaster’s brief innings. After the visitors were all out, South Africa’s two innings lasted a mere 75.3 four-ball overs between them, and ‘England’ won by an innings and 202 runs early enough on the second day for an unscheduled ‘filler’ match 20 Chronologically he was the fifth Irish-born Test cricketer and the first from Ulster, following T.P.Horan, and T.J.D.Kelly of Australia and L.Hone and T.C.O’Brien of England. There have been only five more since McMaster. 21 This comes from a fanciful article about McMaster by Richard Heller, entitled The Hero of Zero , that appeared in Country Life , 5 January 2006. The Unlikeliest Test Cricketer