Lives in Cricket No 23 - Brief Candles

39 Kapoor United Provinces v Northern India Delhi 1935/36 R.Malhotra Jammu and Kashmir v Railways Delhi 1959/60 Two of the three instances in England in the first table, those of Hearne and Herbert, were one-offs, where the circumstances of their non-appearances were decidedly out of the ordinary. We’ll meet these two a little later. For now, let’s concentrate on the other English instance, in which the circumstances that conspired to prevent our man entering the field of play were a little more ‘normal’. The Unlucky Oddfellow For Lancashire, as for most other county sides, 1919 was a season for rebuilding. Three of the players who had appeared in their County Championship side in 1914 had been killed in the war, and a number of other long-serving players had reached the end of their county careers. Only three of those who played in Lancashire’s last Championship match of 1914 also played in their first match of 1919. 55 As the season progressed Lancashire, like several other counties, found difficulty in establishing a settled side. Only four men appeared in 20 or more of their 24 Championship matches, and only another half-dozen appeared in more than half their matches. In all they used 27 players in the Championship season, 56 only five of whom had played more than half of the county’s matches in 1914, and eleven of whom had played no first-class cricket at all in 1914. Ten of these eleven made their first-class debuts in 1919; the other made his Lancashire debut in that year, having not otherwise played at first-class level since 1906. This latter was Vic Norbury, a Hampshire-born all-rounder who had appeared 11 times for his native county in 1905 and 1906. In 1912 he became the professional at East Lancashire, which is Blackburn’s team in the Lancashire League. It was above all on the strength of his League performances that he was selected for Lancashire’s first postwar Championship match. These performances included 100 wickets in 26 single-innings matches of 1912, and 109 in 1913; as a batsman he still holds the East Lancashire club records for most runs and most centuries by a professional. Norbury came close to another century of wickets in the 1919 Lancashire League season, but another East Lancashire bowler was now out-performing him. As Norbury’s county form fell away towards the end of the season, it was this man, Josiah Coulthurst , known as ‘Jos’ or sometimes ‘Josh’, who replaced him in the Lancashire eleven for the final game of the season, at Old Trafford against Northamptonshire. This was a two-day game, as were all Championship matches in 1919, starting on Wednesday 27 August. On that first day, Lancashire won the toss and batted, but incessant 55 To be fair, only three others in the 1919 XI were making their Lancashire debuts. 56 Again to be fair, I should record that they used 28 players in their 26 games of 1914. Never Seen