Lives in Cricket No 29 - AN Hornby

64 Voyage of discovery 2 The conclusion of the tour Harris’s team seemed undaunted by what had happened at Sydney and the day after the match ended, Hornby and some of the other players celebrated their victory by ‘sailing all over the harbour’ in a yacht that had been loaned to them for the afternoon. Harris and his side then moved on to Victoria where they played at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG). The hosts lost £6,000 staging that event – a considerable sum in those days although far less than Glamorgan and Yorkshire lost in putting on Test matches in recent years. Glamorgan suffered a £1.2m financial setback – 70 per cent of their annual operating deficit of £1.7m – when hosting the England-Sri Lanka Test in May 2011, while Yorkshire suffered losses in the region of £1m when staging the Pakistan-Australia Test in the previous year. The loss at Melbourne in 1879 wasn’t due to lack of public interest as was the case at the Swalec Stadium and at Headingley Carnegie; it was put down to the monumental bar bill racked up by the England players. Maybe it was some kind of retribution for the way they had been treated in Sydney. Hornby’s next major on-field contribution came in the game against Twenty Two of Bendigo, which began on 26 February. He scored 77 not out on the first day in an unbroken first-wicket partnership with Francis MacKinnon which had reached 138 at the close. In the evening the group went to Leon’s Circus ‘where one of the clowns imitated Hornby’s batting’, although Royle doesn’t explain this further! Undaunted, Hornby went on to complete his century next morning, finally falling for 104. But the Lancastrian’s effort was in vain with the match ending in a tense draw. At the close, Bendigo needed three more runs, while Lord Harris’s team were still striving for the home side’s twenty-first and final wicket. Hornby made a decent score in the first innings – 86 – in the next game, against Twenty Two of Ballarat at the Eastern Oval, but wasn’t required to don the pads again as Ballarat subsided by ‘an innings and 40-odd runs’, according to Royle’s diary. CricketArchive is, as you would expect, more accurate, giving the winning margin as an innings and 48 runs. There was just one more match remaining on what had been an exhausting three-month tour, the game against Victoria at the MCG, where Hornby scored two runs in each innings and took the same number of wickets (at a cost of nine runs) in a six-wicket win.