Lives in Cricket No 23 - Brief Candles

5 Preface ‘Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more.’ Shakespeare: Macbeth One of cricket’s many delights is its ability to produce unlikely – some might say quirky – events which, though trivial, appeal to those of a certain cast of mind: a cast found perhaps disproportionately among cricket lovers. Brief Candles celebrates the players involved in some of these more unlikely occurrences. More specifically, it tells of some of those who played in just a single first-class match, who were either unable to make an impression in their only chance or who did something special but were not given a second opportunity. Often, as we shall see, they were simply the beneficiary or victim of circumstances. This book began as an attempt to write fairly full biographies of just two players: probably the most obscure Test cricketer, Emile McMaster, and the man with the shortest ever on-field first-class career, Frederick Hyland. With an eye to wider public interest, our series editor gently but wisely nudged me away from concentrating on just these two players. So how to expand the range of cricketers to be covered? Noticing that both McMaster and Hyland were, like me, born on the 16th of the month, and on a Saturday to boot, I wondered briefly if a whole book on cricketers born on Saturday 16th might have legs. Mercifully, I was quickly able to conclude that it didn’t, even though some very famous cricketers share that birth distinction, among them Jack Hobbs, Stan McCabe and Heath Streak. Instead I began to focus on a batch of ‘one-match wonders’ who, I felt, deserved more recognition for their admittedly limited exploits on the first-class cricket field. As well as detailing those exploits, I wanted to know how they came to be playing a first-class match in the first place, and why didn’t they do so again. So that, in essence, is what Brief Candles is about. The book falls into three parts. The first three chapters deal with ‘those who didn’t’ – first-class cricketers who had only very brief on-field careers, such as McMaster and Hyland, together with several others who never had an on-field career at all. The next three chapters look at some of ‘those who did’ – players who, in their only first-class match, either scored a lot of runs, took a lot of wickets, or achieved some other memorable