Lives in Cricket No 26 - HV Hesketh-Prichard

103 Before the War by now was probably past his best, and he followed up with Macartney and Armstrong. This was probably the first time such an exercise had been undertaken, at least in the public prints: it will have been stimulated by the presence of both Australia and South Africa. In July 1912 the Badminton Magazine printed an article by Hex called Contemporary Cricket , in which he says that the editor has asked him to write because of the experience of coming back into first-class cricket after six years out (which is and would have been unusual, and perhaps especially unusual for a bowler). During that time he had played plenty of cricket in, he says, ‘the Elysian Fields of so-called second-class cricket’ . That alone makes his thoughts worth noting, but Hex believed that increasingly batting friendly wickets and the widespread use of Nottingham marl, producing very flat but not very quick wickets, were making the game less interesting and making it easier for mediocre batsmen to stay in and accumulate runs. (Does this somehow sound familiar?) ‘Each year,’ he says, ‘sees more centuries compiled – that is the word, compiled – by these indifferent batsmen.’ ‘These,’ he suggests, ‘are often numbers seven and eight in the order, who on perfect wickets progress towards their goal at the rate of about thirty runs per hour,’ where ten years before they would have had a quick swing and got out. They might not get runs if they went in first, but often come in against tiring bowlers late in the day and are happy to stick there. So the totals scored increase, but they are scored more slowly. Essentially he is arguing that there had been a great increase in negative cricket, both from batsmen and bowlers. The common belief is that the ‘Golden Age’ of stroke play, of demon fast bowlers or crafty spinners, was brought to an end by the War, and the flat wickets of the 1920s. But here we have Hex suggesting that it was ending before then, ended by perfect wickets and defensive cricket: It has always seemed to me that with Armstrong bowling his famous leg-theory at one end and an off-theorist at the other end under the play-to-a finish rule, that cricket might be reduced to as dull a spectacle as a fourth-class game of croquet. Much the same complaints had been raised by Philip Trevor in The Problems of Cricket in 1907, 55 so what we can see is a trend, and a trend that was set to continue throughout the inter-war period as scores got larger and scoring slower. Hex ends by lamenting the disappearance of the truly fast bowler, suggesting that W.B.Burns was the last existing fast bowler in England. But Burns, a Worcestershire amateur who was to die in the Great War, was not a really top-class bowler. A codicil laments the habit – ‘disgustingly unsportsmanlike’ – of writing to the newspapers with your own views about selection. What would he have made of Twitter! 55 P.C.W.Trevor, The Problems of Cricket, Sampson Low and Co, 1907.