Lives in Cricket No 29 - AN Hornby

65 Hornby’s bowling was miserly in the extreme and he sent down eleven maidens in his fifteen overs. Contemporaneous reports describe Hornby’s deliveries as ‘Sydney Grubbers’. This was a ball that was ‘a fast underhand delivery aimed directly at the middle stump and at no time did ever leave the ground’. ‘The MCG spectators became angry. First they chanted “why don’t you have a go?” and when the difficulty of scoring off Hornby became apparent they switched to “take him off”.’ Unsurprisingly, his economy rate during his entire 29-year career was a respectable 1.74 per four-ball over, but he bowled only 593 balls in first-class cricket and took just eleven wickets. In fact, Hornby was one of only 130 cricketers who are known to have bowled underarm in a first-class game, according to Gerald Brodribb’s The Lost Art – a History of Under-arm Bowling , published in 1997. Perhaps the most famous (or infamous) incident of underarm bowling came at the MCG a century later, when in February 1981 Australia captain Greg Chappell asked his younger brother Trevor to bowl underarm in a One-Day International against New Zealand. The Black Caps needed six runs to win off the last ball, but Trevor Chappell bowled it all along the ground, resulting in an Australia win. Afterwards, the then Prime Minister of New Zealand, Robert Muldoon, described it as ‘the most disgusting incident I can recall in the history of cricket’, going on to say that ‘it was an act of true cowardice and I consider it appropriate that the Australian team were wearing yellow’. Even the Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, called the act ‘contrary to the traditions of the game’. On air for Australia’s Channel 9 at the time, veteran commentator Richie Benaud described the act as ‘disgraceful’. ‘It was one of the worst things I have ever seen done on a cricket field’. The New Zealand leg of Hornby’s tour featured a one-day single innings match against a Canterbury XI, in which Lord Harris’s XI was a mixed team containing five Canterbury players. Hornby opened the batting and the bowling. He scored 66 and finished with four for 53 (although the scorecard differs from his analysis, crediting him with only three wickets) in a 56-run win for the visitors. The tourists had a long rest from cricket and weren’t in action again for about six weeks, when they reached New York on 5 May. At the St George’s Club in Hoboken, Lord Harris’s XI played a team that called itself the United States of America, made up Voyage of discovery 2